


Living On My Own

by rekishi



Series: Much Flailing About Time-displaced Super Soldiers [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovered Memories, Thor Needs a Hug, Tony/Cybernetic Arm!OTP, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rekishi/pseuds/rekishi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Barnes is back in the world and finds that not only has there been 1) an alien invasion, but 2) Howard Stark had a kid. One that dispenses unsolicited life advice, no less. Oh, and 3) Captain America is alive again, after getting himself killed by his own recklessness in a move so stupid only Steve could have come up with it. In which James learns to do laundry, turns into an accidental neighborhood vigilante and makes Tony Stark a happy grease monkey, all while he figures out where to stake his claim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living On My Own

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal, never ending gratitude to my beta, sounding board, honest feedbacker, adviser, and most important of all friend [carmenta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carmenta). This is as much hers as it is mine, in a sense.
> 
> While I appreciate a good trope, I needed to veer away from the well-trodden paths of the regaining of memories storyline, as my take on Bucky doesn't concur with it. I wanted a fic where the man has agency for himself, but I also wanted the process and not just be presented with the ready solution. I futzed a bit with some minor things, like the date of Bucky's death at the Smithsonian display is given as 1944 rather than 1945.
> 
> Rating is mostly for violence, please heed the warnings.
> 
> Title is of course taken from the genius mind of Freddie Mercury.

He felt his shoulders slump in what he had to suppose was relief when he saw his own face staring back at him. James Buchanan Barnes, 1917-1945. 

The name tasted strange in his thoughts. Truth was, he wasn't entirely sure how he was supposed to feel, what 'James Barnes' would feel like if he remembered all of who that man was, but he was almost sure this was not it. Yet clearly that was who he was, that was apparently his name, no matter the circumstances. He'd lived with code names and descriptions for himself for so long that it felt weird to associate an actual name with the younger face looking back at him from the display.

He frowned. 'Bucky' felt even less familiar, less a part of him — a nickname that should have been buried long before his previous identity, but when he recalled Steve, fucking Captain America, Rogers saying it, his brain didn't protest. He stilled into the sniper's mindset — intimately familiar and comfortable like worn boots — and examined that thought with the clinical precision that had probably kept him useful over the past decades. Steve was—

Something came hurdling at him and he just managed to avoid it, his fingers twitched to a knife that wasn't there (a knife in his boots, yes, but the one at his hip was missing), before the children's laughter registered. 

"Sorry sir!" a little boy called up to him before running off, a girl who was probably his sister rolled her eyes and chasing after him. 

The woman next to him — mid-thirties, brunette, pretty, sensible shoes for walking, a slight cant to one eyebrow that spoke of a scar rather than nerve damage — wrinkled her nose and crunched her eyes slightly. "Sorry, it's their first time in Washington. Ever since the Battle of New York, they've wanted to see the exhibition and we finally caved. And then this happened the other day, they've hardly slept with the excitement."

Battle of New York, he filed away before turning the corners of his mouth up, hoping it looked like a smile. "Don't worry about it, it's probably exciting for children, especially with recent events." Not to mention the merchandise, because no one could tell him the museum wasn't turning a pretty penny.

She winked at him. He wasn't sure that the final smile he gave her might not have been a grimace and he quickly went to a more secluded corner — good view of the room, fewest possible blind spots even with the mess if displays to walk around. A shudder went through him and he took a deep breath to steady himself. 

He'd been twenty-eight years old when he'd been presumed dead, and he didn't know for sure, but if he was any judge, he was barely in his thirties now. He didn't feel thirty. He didn't feel some ninety-odd years, either. None of it really made sense, but he would be damned if he didn't get it to make sense, because he wasn't going back to whatever was left of HYDRA or SHIELD, or whatever acronym they went by now. Plus, he was pretty sure that even James Barnes would have bitten off his tongue before going to Steve Rogers — pre or post serum didn't seem to matter much for this man, weakness couldn't be an excuse and neither could fear — so for now he was on his own.

The Soldier, the Asset, the nameless, senseless puppet that Zola, Lukin, Pierce and whatever else their names might have been had ruled by fear and pain, was better left at the bottom of the Potomac. James Barnes had lost decades and, whoever he might turn out to be, probably had better things to do than stand around in an exhibition for the glorified chorus girl Steve Rogers, who had gotten himself killed by his own recklessness and apparently made James Barnes' worst fears come true.

***

Howard Stark had a kid. Out of all the things from the SHIELD dump James had read on his stolen laptop — it was laughably easy to steal shit these days, he'd basically just walked into a Virginia bus station and walked out with a shiny silver case that contained more computing power than they'd ever dreamed of in the Thirties — that was maybe the most shocking one. Because Howard had been, well, Howard. James wasn't sure how he had come to this conclusion, but over the last few days he'd learned to accept things he just knew from _somewhere_ and fact check them later when possible.

He knew for sure which was best bakery on their block on Brooklyn — now probably long closed — as well as had perfect recall of the necklace his mother used to wear. On the other hand there were the first kill he'd ever made on behalf of the Soviets — a prisoner of war, a test to see whether he would obey — and the letter that had told him he'd been drafted and how afraid he had been.

He shook his head and eyed the other passengers on the bus; some played with their phones, others were sleeping or reading or quietly chatting with their fellow travelers, but conversation had died down fairly quickly. It was just a few hours to New York from the District, the chances of anyone knowing where he was and what he was doing were slim, but he hadn't survived World War II by being careless. Well, or survived it as long as he had, anyway. 

The road rolled by steadily outside the window and he breathed a little easier for being away from his last known whereabouts.

The data dump from the SHIELD takedown, courtesy of Captain America and Black Widow, was the first and only thing he'd loaded onto the machine after gutting it of anything personal from its previous owner and taking care of transferring funds. He figured that after seventy years of service, overtime, assassinations, plus compensation for all injuries sustained, HYDRA owed him a king's ransom.

His right arm was sore and he flexed his hand, stretched the limb until he heard a popping sound, tension easing. The break had healed quickly, more evidence of what they had done with him, but he still couldn't hold it still for long or it seized up.

Going in, he wasn't sure what he had expected, especially after the newspaper headlines were still falling over themselves with revelations. The files contained nothing on the Winter Soldier, which was only mildly surprising as keeping files on top secret assassins in cryofreeze was stupid. The rest… 

James had stretched out over two seats, his hair hiding his face. The bus was half-empty and no one had even looked too long in his direction. A glance out the window showed him stretches of tarmac and rows over rows of cars passing them by. 

Most of the remaining files were a collection of incident reports, bribes and dead bodies, identities former and current of field agents, the release of which had probably cost many lives, but strictly speaking none of this was a surprise for him. He'd paged through some online archived newspaper articles using the station's wifi about the Battle of New York and for now concentrated on the participants there while perusing the material.

Aliens! James felt he'd been through that particular hysteria once already when old H.G. Wells had them all running scared from Martians. Nothing would faze him there, except maybe that the old Vikings had been a bit ahead of all the rest of them. How an alien fleet had let themselves be defeated by a group of very human beings (and the God of Thunder) was still in want of an answer and he had the uncomfortable feeling someone still had a trump up their sleeve, and that it wasn't the fucking Tesseract. That thing had cost all of them enough already, including, it seemed, Steve his life for coming on seventy years.

Steve… He felt he should not poke that particular spot in his mind just yet and left his file for later.

Anthony Stark, son of Howard and Maria Stark, compulsive and volatile behavior, narcissistic, not recommended for the Avengers Initiative. That sounded like Howard all right, seemed that all of his best character traits had rubbed off on his son. Who had apparently taken his father's ideas a step further, constructing what was apparently a battle suit with flight capabilities. James shook his head. Starks were all mad, but ultimately that insanity was what had redeemed Howard for him. Why Howard had needed redemption in the first place became apparent when James followed the link and glanced over the man's file; Project Rebirth didn't sit well with him even now. Seventy years ago, when Steve had been the guinea pig, he must have downright hated it.

James glanced at his left arm, encased in a long sleeve and black leather glove. He'd been a prisoner of war, and while the exhibit hadn't stated it outright, it had been obvious from between the lines that _something_ had been done to him even before the Soviets started training him. He should never have survived a fall down a ravine.

On to the next file. Turned out that Bruce Banner was as much a victim and product of overzealous science as Captain America and James himself. James could relate. If it had been him, he wouldn't have returned to the fold either. He wasn't doing so now.

One of the passengers started to curse up a blue streak at something he read on his tablet.

Codename: Black Widow. Her story was a grimly familiar one and he didn't even need to look at the list of her aliases or missions to know she was a product of the Red Room and had been one of their agents long after the formal collapse of the Union. He knew why she was doing what she was doing now and he also knew that she had probably seen it as her only choice. He wondered if Natalia Alianovna Romanoff was her real name or if it was just the one that had become a second skin, least tainted by her actions as an active agent, if she even remembered the name she'd been born with.

A middle aged man passed in the middle aisle and James covertly watched him as he went towards the restroom. No danger from that one. 

Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, was probably the most ordinary in that group of 'Avengers' (and only an organization such as SHIELD could come up with a name like that), and that should have told James all he needed to know. Well, safe for that episode when he'd been mind controlled, and if James didn't know that song and dance routine he would be damned.

He sighed before finally pulling up the information on Steve, but didn't get any further than the picture staring at him earnestly from the top of the page. At the exhibit there had been one surviving image of him before Project Rebirth, a skinny little guy too dumb to run away from any and all fights; except that he had fought James, had broken his arm with bullets in his guts for control of the chip to bring down the whole operation. James knew he could have easily killed him, bashed in his skull with his left arm, let him drown in the river. He hadn't. He wasn't entirely sure why; the first instinct in a long while that didn't center itself around blood and orders and killing, and he had fought that man who kept insisting they knew each other, who called him an unfamiliar name, James had fought him tooth and nail because he knew he'd pay the price if he gave in. The carrier would come down though, whatever he did, it had already almost killed him once and this infuriating man who had once stretched his hand out to him on a speeding train insisted on knowing him and James' head insisted that he couldn't be the one to let him die. Dragging him from the water in turn had only been fair, after all he'd not let James go down when the steel pillar buried him.

Shaking his head, he closed the computer. He'd get to Steve later.

At Port Authority Terminal, he left the computer in a trash can.

***

New York was still the same. Though intellectually James knew that couldn't be right, randomly walking around Manhattan from Port Authority still felt as if he'd been doing it all his life. Probably he had, or at least a good part of it. New Yorkers were easily distinguished from tourists and James tried to find the middle way, somewhere between indifference and trying to spot familiar sights. At least Grand Central Station and the Public Library were still where he'd left them, which meant that in the end, New York didn't really change.

He crossed over into Brooklyn across a bridge that he _knew_ they had crossed thousands of times in all kinds of weather, tired, exhausted, sick to their stomachs, hungover to beat the band and he couldn't help but breathe a little easier. The first time they'd ever done it alone they'd felt so daring and grown up, and then it had become common place, because it was Brooklyn Bridge, it belonged to them. Tourists mingled with natives, each at their own speed.

If he had expected an avalanche of memories when his feet hit the Brooklyn side, he was sorely mistaken and he wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. If he was James Barnes, shouldn't home mean more to him than concrete and wooden slats? Instead of making that decision, he ducked into a department store for a necessary change of clothes and toiletries, only to check into a hotel with a half-empty sports bag. It was the first time in a long time that he'd picked out his own clothes and that definitely felt good. 

The shower had very little pressure and the water smelled of chlorine, it wasn't at all like a water hose, and the slow trickle down his back eased his muscles. The bed was not an option. When he'd first left the man lying on the riverbank and walked away, it had taken some time to associate the heavy feeling behind his eyes with tiredness and identify sleep as a remedy for both his broken arm and heavy mind. All safehouses in the area had probably been blown, but warehouses stood empty even in the most heavily frequented areas and breaking into one was easy. Sleep cleared his mind enough to decide to find out how much was true about what the man, his mission, Captain America, whose blood smeared face was so familiar it triggered an ache deep inside, had been going on about.

James pulled off the bedding to lay it on the filthy floor. 

Assassins were paranoid sleepers, though he probably would have heard the commotion in the alley downstairs even if his sleep had been deeper. Soldiers learned to sleep anywhere through everything short of artillery fire and unfamiliar boots on the ground, but the muffled yelling and dirty laughter were noises that didn't belong. He sat up straight, heart hammering in his chest, and it took several deep breaths and considerable willpower to get it back under control.

"Hey!" he yelled out the window at two guys bending over something on the ground, cajoling and laughing, and when they didn't stop, James vaulted out in the alley downstairs. Because most thugs were cowards, that did the trick this time and they bolted with a "Shit, man, let's get outta here."

Frowning, James turned around to find a woman on the ground, her clothes askew and he got a rather good idea of what he'd interrupted. Keeping his distance, he crouched down in order not to loom over her. "Hi. Are you okay?"

She whimpered, but dared to raise her head from where it had been firmly pressed down to her chest, cradled by her arms, then quickly looked away again. James couldn't fault her, the alley hardly got any light from the perpendicular street and he was dressed in the black jeans and hoodie he'd been sleeping in. He, however, could see perfectly; maybe night vision was one of the perks of super soldiers. 

"Yeah, I know. Look, do you want me to go in and tell the manager to call the police for you?" he asked, because damn it, his mother had raised him to be polite, he'd do what he could here.

She was quiet for a moment and then decided he could probably just as easily attack her where she was on the floor if he really wanted, so she let out a long shuddering breath and sat up. She was in her mid to late thirties and her makeup was smudged around her eyes, but she raised her chin at him. "And what do you think they're going to do?" her accent was not-quite-Brooklyn.

He shrugged. "I don't know, look for those guys?"

"You're not from here, right?" she started to pick herself up and he made to offer her a hand, but she declined with a sharp jerk of her head. "The police is going to do jack shit for people like me."

Oh the irony. But he backed off to let her have space, just eyed her. "Can I do something else?"

"No." Then she looked up at him, squinting. This started to feel far too familiar. "Thank you. Please don't follow me."

James raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender and stepped out of her way. "Wouldn't dream of it."

She gave him a tight smile and all he could do was make sure she got to the mouth of the alley unmolested, before considering his options. The manager had been an asshole earlier and James wasn't too keen on dealing with him in the dead of night, so he climbed the rain pipe that was almost ready to fall apart and slipped back into his window. People had never needed war to do each other harm, he'd do good to remember that little fact.

***

"In the fucking light of day? You can't be serious!" He knew he should believe it, because it was happening everywhere, then why shouldn't it happen in New York City?

A man in a suit was still held at gunpoint by three boys who couldn't be eighteen yet and who clearly had no idea what they were doing. In James' experience, people who had no clue what they were doing were the most dangerous, which was why Steve's harebrained mission into Austria should have failed horribly. James didn't have time to examine that thought as he made slow and deliberate movements towards the little group.

He wasn't necessarily worried for himself, he'd been shot before, more times than the few scars he bore would attest to, but the guy in the suit was clearly out of his depth. "Easy fellas," he said, straining to inflect that same ease in his voice when he didn't really feel it. The Winter Soldier had not been trained or programmed to care about what collateral damage he left in his wake, someone else would clean it but, but James didn't have that option and he didn't want it either. 

"Leave," one of the boys hissed and he pointed his gun at James, barrel shaking so much he wouldn't have hit the broad side of a barn, but there was a street behind them and any ricochets could have hit passers by. "Just leave and you won't have any trouble with us."

"Not really an option anymore," James answered and took another measured step. His finger twitched for a trigger to pull, and it was hard to ignore the muscle memory. "Just give up, leave him alone and no one will be hurt. No one else has to know about this. We won't even call the police. Right?" From the corner of his eye he could see the guy with the suit nodding vigorously.

"He just needs to give us his money. And you, you also give us your money. Then everything is okay." The third boy also had a gun that he swung between James and his intended victim back and forth, finger on the trigger and it was only a matter of time until he'd accidentally fired.

It would be easy to unhand the boy closest to him, he was only two steps away and James knew he had better reflexes than any of them, but that still left two. All three of them were too nervous for this not to have a high chance to end with dead bodies. James considered his options, the part of him that had sniped axis soldiers to protect his unit, that had lain in wait for the perfect shot during a mission and given him his reputation taking control. He knew he could take them. Nothing would have shown on his face even if it hadn't been obscured by the hood of his sweater. Then he backed off half a step.

"Okay," he admitted. "Let's just make sure no one gets seriously hurt. Here, have my wallet."

As far as anyone on the street was concerned, James was unarmed, only someone trained for it would have seen the concealed knife at his hip and might have guessed at the ones in his boots. To anyone else, the careful movements he made might have indicated his was indeed grabbing for his wallet.

The boy with the gun pointed at him licked his lips nervously and when his gaze flicked away for a split second James had his opening. He lunged for him and relieved him of his gun with his right hand while in the same movement throwing the knife with his left towards the gun pointed at the man in the suit. The edge was never meant to do any arm, the hilt clattering against the metal was enough to knock it out of the boy's hand and made him turn horrified towards James, who in the meantime had swept his assailant's feet from under him and taken him out.

The suit scrambled for both the knife and the gun, though James was fairly sure he was far too scared to do anything with either of them. The gesture seemed to be enough as would-be-robber #2 raised his arms, nervously looking between James and his intended victim. The third boy wasn't smart enough to realize he was hopelessly outmatched.

"You don't get me!" he yelled and pointed the gun at James, obviously having grasped that he was the more dangerous option. A shot rang out, but James had already dropped and rolled, knocking him off his feet and kneeling on his back, twisting his arm until he released the gun.

From start to finish, the action had taken less than ten of James' measured heartbeats. It wasn't even enough to get his adrenaline up.

"Get out of here, go back to school and don't do something like this again unless you _know_ what you're doing," James hissed in his most gravelly, most dangerous voice and gave the boy's arm one more painful twist for good measure before letting him up to scramble after his friends, who'd already taken flight. Shaking his head, James stood up and slowly stepped towards the suit, who was quivering like a leaf and in danger of hurting himself either with the gun or the knife. "Are you fine, do you need a doctor?"

Suit guy took a few breaths clearly aimed at steadying himself while James took the weapons from him as gently as he was able to and both items were released willingly. "No, no, I think— Okay. They didn't do anything. Thank you! Oh my God, are you okay?"

With a smile that he didn't feel James stepped back to get out of the guy's reach while he slipped the knife back into its sheath and the gun with the safety on into the waistband if his jeans. His black hoodie would conceal he bulges. He's need to do something with them eventually, but he was undecided on whether he might want to keep them, cheap as they were. "I'm fine, no worries."

"Thank you so much for coming by and interfering and I can't thank you enough. I was supposed to meet a client, but…" The guy trailed off and looked around dubiously. "I should be able to go where I want."

That attitude would get him killed one day but James held his tongue, just started herding him to the mouth of the alley. "Maybe set your meeting places in the more populated areas," he suggested instead.

The suit nodded eagerly. "Yes, yes. What's your name, how can I thank you? Where did you learn to do that? That was amazing! Does this happen to you often?"

James grit his teeth, sure _he_ would snap and leave the guy gagged and bound on the street if he kept talking. "No, it's fine. Don't worry about it. Look there's a subway station, just go back to your office and forget about it, okay? And be more careful in the future."

He all but fled the scene before anyone else could come by or the guy got the idea to call the police after all. James was pretty sure he hadn't seen his face clearly and wanted to make sure it stayed that way. He couldn't afford the attention and didn't want to take chances.

The guns were a constant pressure on his hips.

That night he dreamt of falling, the same scene on repeat over and over again; ice and snow and wind whipping his hair and his clothes, cold seeping in where the seams came together, falling, falling on repeat, a rush in his ears and Steve's hand reaching out for him for a split second, sometimes. When he finally hit the bottom he came awake with a start, cold sweat pooling in every hollow of his body, heart beating a staccato in his chest like the arrhythmias Steve had had before the serum cured it, and he was shivering. He sat up gingerly, cold rivulets running down his skin, making him shiver even more. The scar where his left shoulder attached to the rest of him ached with phantom pain and he could only sling his arms around his knees and bury his forehead against them, creating a small hollow where he might breathe.

He'd woken up from nightmares before, but never wrecked like this. And Steve— He shut that thought down with an iron lid and shoved it back into the back of his mind. Later. He took another breath and pulled a face. His clothes smelled sour, reeking a bit of the alley he'd pulled suit guy out of and he was pretty sure he was disgusting. In a way, he was sure he'd blend in with his room just fine that way, but that thought was just as disturbing. 

He knew his memories were coming back. He knew things the Winter Soldier hadn't cared about. That's why the dreams happened, probably. He could close his eyes and at will recall his parents, Steve's mother as she had withered away one day at a time, the house he had lived in until his own parents died. He'd been at the library to look at images from the Thirties, but that hadn't worked to trigger memories the way he felt it should. Walking the streets, feeling the city did, to some extent. The smell of the river, the miles under his feet. Trying to remember something only gave him headaches.

Memories, he contemplated under the shower, were a strange thing. Apparently he wasn't the only one thinking that, because even the internet didn't seem to have a handy guide of how to recover them after seven decades of brainwashing, he'd checked at the library. The internet at least had also informed him that what was shot was his episodic memory, because he knew for a fact that his ability to shoot a gun or handle a knife were not affected. His index finger twitched and he made a fist to stop it. All the memory theory had given him headaches though and he'd decided to take them as they came.

He'd been right about Howard Stark, at least. The man didn't even seem like the settling down type in the very positive biographies that had been written on him; no wonder James had been so shocked to find he'd had a kid. Though by all reports, that had been a fraught relationship and James wondered how much that son had known about his father's involvement in the goings on during the war before the SHIELD files had gone public. Probably not much, secret organizations like that operated strictly on a need to know basis and Anthony Stark didn't appear more than a cog in the gears. An obstinate one at that. Square peg, round hole.

The following day he was at a laundromat and willing to just bash it in to make it to operate, because the reek of his clothes reminded him far too much of the sweater he'd worn for weeks at a time at the front. He was dressed in his second set of clothes, in the sweater he had bought to spite himself, a bright blue affair with the Captain America shield printed on the chest. He felt slightly exposed out of his blacks, but that took a back seat to the fact that he was a highly trained assassin of international renown, with at least thirty political kills on his resumé, who could operate any weapon that had ever shown up on the face of the earth, but he was apparently defeated by something as simple as a washing machine. It was asking for fabric softener and had drawers and too many knobs.

"Can I help you, young man?" a small voice asked from his left and he knew he flinched but he couldn't help it. Turning his head slowly, he saw an older lady that barely reached up to his biceps and he glowered for a moment before he caught himself. The woman took a careful and slow step back, eyes wary and James consciously unclenched his fists and relaxed his features. "I didn't mean to startle you," she added and took another step back, clearly ready for flight.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't hear you come in. I … have no idea how to get it to wash my clothes."

Her smile turned into what could only be described as a full blown smirk and for some reason he had to think of his grade school teacher . "I thought that might be the case," she told him and pointed to an alcove in the wall. "You need to get tokens from the room next door. It'll also give you detergent, if you don't have any."

"Oh," he answered intelligently and shuffled over. That made sense. He'd seen the slit for the coin but couldn't determine how much he was supposed to feed it. Now that made sense. When he came back she eyed him critically. "These are not the type of machines I'm used to," he admitted and tried to recall when had been the last time that he'd done his own laundry. Maybe never. Certainly never in a fancy machine. He still remembered washboards and tubs and hours of scrubbing and soaking and pressing.

"I can see that. You just got discharged, didn't you?" That startled him again and it must have shown, for she smiled again . James wondered if he'd been found and whether he should go for his knife. The guns from the other day were safely stashed away for the moment; he didn't fully trust himself in carrying them . "I was an Army nurse for forty years, I know that stance, always ready to move. Did you see action?" He nodded warily and she gave him a sharp nod in return. "I thought so. Don't worry, laundry is the easiest thing you'll have to master."

He looked at her for a long moment, gauging her as she put her own laundry into one of the machines and then produced a token from her purse. Curiosity got the better of him eventually. "And what's the hardest?"

She stopped on her way to one of the tables set aside for customers to wait at and shrugged. "Knowing when to stop being ready. And in your case, maybe shopping for clothes." She indicated his machine that contained one pair of jeans, one hoodie and several pairs of underwear and socks, then the one he was currently wearing.

He grinned in response, self-deprecatingly because she probably was right and then offered to buy her a coffee from the place two houses down as a thank you. When he returned – coffee didn't taste the same as it had before the war, or at the front; he didn't know if that was good or bad, but at least it tasted better than the ersatz stuff they'd had for a while – he sat down at her table with the paper he'd picked up as well. She introduced herself as Dorothy, saying her father had proposed to her mother during a _Wizard of Oz_ screening, and he found he was growing more and more comfortable with his own name again when he introduced himself.

He ignored the world news because it would be more HYDRA and SHIELD fallout, which meant more agents hunted down and more global political involvement than he wanted right now. His companion raised an eyebrow when he put away the section, but didn't say anything, taking a sip from her paper cup instead. "Coffee doesn't taste right anymore," he offered, because it seemed a safe topic and it might cover any sorts of 'before'.

"It's the chains and people's oversweet taste," she told him. "The Army might not have the best coffee in the world, but it at least caters to a specific group of people. Try smaller places, you might find something you like."

He nodded noncommittally, digging through the local news. "Is there more crime these days or does it just get reported more often?" When no answer was forthcoming he looked over and saw the old lady smile ruefully. "Pardon?"

"You sound like someone several times your age, young man." James froze to his chair, had to force his muscles to relax one by one. "I'm not sure. I grew up in the country, the community there used to either look away or take care of their own. Here… More people, more crimes committed. And with the last few years, the things that young man tried to do to this city and then what happened in Washington, maybe people are more on edge."

With a small start James realized that by 'that young man' she meant Loki, who according to the SHIELD files had to be considerably older than her. It made him almost try to smile.

"And then you have stories like Captain America returning or even smaller things, like that," she tapped the top of the page he'd just turned, "and it makes you think maybe it's not so bad after all."

He skimmed over the story she'd indicated and had to concentrate very hard on breathing for a few moments. That was his suit in the picture, the guy he'd gotten away from those boys yesterday, who had apparently not taken his sudden disappearance act too well and had gone running to a newspaper to tell them about the dark hooded stranger who had saved his life. 

Fuck.

"James?" Dorothy asked, mild concern on her face. She knew better than to reach out for him or make any sudden moves at least, she merely tried to catch his eye.

"Yeah," he heard himself say. "I just thought I knew this guy for a moment, but I think I was wrong, he doesn't look anything like him after all."

His voice fell flat and he didn't manage even his fake version of a smile and it was beyond clear she didn't believe him, but mercifully she let it rest. He was saved by the washing machine finishing its cycle and he let her show him how to operate the tumble dryer, and that at least was one of the most useful machines James had ever seen. They would have killed for something like that back in the 30s, even more so at the front when the next fresh change of clothes was at least a week away and they'd all smelled too much of wet wool and each other.

The evening found him in a dive bar that claimed to have been there since the 30's, but if it had James had either never been there or the interior had been done over so many times that nothing of the original remained. Somehow, looking at the nicotine stained walls, smoke residue and even one of two bullet holes, James doubted that theory very much. He sat at the bar, ordered a beer and kept his head down.

He'd noticed, after Steve had gotten him out of Austria, that alcohol wasn't doing for him what it used to, of course, but he distinctly remembered that he'd decided not to think about it then. They had a war to win, and Steve had gone completely crazy, thinking he could take on HYDRA all by himself with but a single unit of equally crazy men. James didn't have time to worry about what might have been done to him. Now he had the answer. Not that it mattered, he wasn't in the mental state in which he should get drunk anyway. If he did, he might resemble the very real image of the loose cannon, no matter that he wasn't carrying anything with firepower right then.

The discussions around the bar washed over him, he recognized Russian and French among the languages floating through the room but didn't follow any of the conversational threads with intent. He did see the bartender shove a wad of cash at one of the patrons and James casually marked the guy while taking a swallow of his beer. That guy was the only one carrying here right now, but it was pretty packed for a weekday and James didn't want to start a panic.

He raised his finger to indicate another pint, which was when someone slid onto the stool beside him. "You're new, aren't you?"

James raised an eyebrow, paid his drink and turned around. "And what if I am?"

"People are looking into it," the guy said and James frowned and he continued to clarify, "what you just saw."

"I saw nothing," James answered and turned back to his beer.

From the corner of his eye he could see the young guy smile. "Maybe better that way. So do you plan to come here more often?"

"I don't know. What does this place have to offer that others don't?"

"Me, for example. I'm Joe." Joe leaned in, grinned and put a hand on his lower arm. His left arm. It was an effort in self-control not to lash out at him. "Wow, that's some muscle. Hard as steel."

James almost spit his beer back into the glass, but swallowed with some difficulty and laughed, a bitter sound that shocked even himself. "Tell me, when did you try flirting the last time?"

"Before the shit in Washington went down I once saw Hawkeye in a bar. He was very drunk." Joe seemed almost proud of himself. But of course he'd go for someone from the group of people that James did his damnest to try to avoid for the moment.

"Did you. And what did he say?"

"He didn't really go for it, mumbled something about Hollywood, assignments that suck and never letting himself be volunteered again. Shame though, the man's arms are even more fantastic up close than on TV." Joe sighed melodramatically and downed the rest of his drink, the suspicious tang of bad vodka surrounded him for a second.

James knew the rules of this game. If he got up now and went out the back door, Joe would follow him into the alley. This would hardly have changed in the last seventy years, but James really had no interest in going down that road right now, but he also didn't want to keep sitting next to Joe and listen to his bad pick-up lines. The bartender caught his eye, gave him a half-shrug and turned to the next customer. James downed the rest of his beer in three large gulps and got up.

The guy who'd gotten the money was still there, bent over a pool table, probably hustling other customers for money. That wasn't worth interfering and James had done that particular thing in the past. Actually, he'd been good at it and he wondered if maybe…

Instead of leaving the bar altogether he turned towards the tables and waited for the current game to finish. Joe drifted in his general direction but didn't seem keen in accosting him in hearing range of the racketeering shithead.

"Cool," James said casually after a few minutes. "I used to play a few years ago. Care for a game?"

"Sure," racketeering shithead said with a grin that could only be called wolfish. "Let's say ten bucks to start and then we double the stakes?"

"Sounds good," James agreed and took out a note, showing clearly the stash of cash he carried.

An hour later he left by the front door, having cleaned out the racketeer minion for the last of his worldly possessions – or at least that was what the guy had claimed. Within seconds he vanished around a corner and scaled the building, settling on the edge of the roof. It took half a minute, then the little shithead came out the door, cursing and frantically looking up and down the street, clearly looking where James might have gone before taking off. James followed him silently over rooftops, jumping from one edge to the other, feeling the joy of the hunt. He marked the basement the shithead vanished into and used the roofs to navigate back to his hotel that hardly deserved the name. 

He dreamed of lying on the ground with his rifle and snow lightly dusting his back, metal arm on the trigger and Captain America in his crosshairs, orienting himself. The man he eventually downed had a weapon trained on that ridiculous uniform, ready to pull his own trigger. He breathed in, felt his heart throb against his ribs, exhaled, felt his heart throb again and pulled the trigger when everything inside of him was still. He woke calm and relaxed on the floor, index finger twitching.

***

Food was very much hit or miss.

After a particularly bad night that had featured a dream in which Dr. Zola kept pushing an icepick into his ear while someone who was very clearly Red Room kept pushing guns into his hands that had ended in him throwing up his dinner consisting of pizza, James had spent the morning annoyed and grumpy in the library. No one paid him any mind; on other days a librarian would come to ask him if he needed something or a kid would try to bum cigarettes off him, but that day, he thought his mood might kill someone. 

He'd more or less convinced himself that the nightmares were his brain deciding which memories to slot into shelves in the right order and if that gave him back at least partial recall, he was willing to live with them for a while. The food situation, however, was unacceptable. Which was why he spent that morning with medical databases and textbooks, reading about things like refeeding syndrome and sudden changes in diet and the like. Eventually that made him come to the conclusion that it was probably a combination of his old fashioned digestive system not being used to all the artificial grease and sugar additives added to modern food, and his handlers having supplied him with everything he needed nutritionwise, but not necessarily in a particularly diverse and tasty way.

That also meant the only way to fix it was to keep eating and see if it fixed itself. The wonders of the human body, apparently being supplied with a hotch potch version of the Rebirth Serum meant jack shit. He wrinkled his nose and went to take his customary tour through the SHIELD files. The internet was a wonderful place, people had started to data mine, sort and analyze and speculate over what all of it meant, at least the parts that weren't clear as day. Admittedly, most of it was utter bullshit, but there were a few nuggets that James could recognize as being true when he read them. 

Thor, God of Thunder, had apparently wreaked havoc in London half a year ago, which probably didn't make the British too happy with him, but it seemed the other option had been the destruction of the Earth, so maybe that mellowed them somewhat. His brother had not been spotted, and James really should get up to speed on his Norse mythology, if that was to be a thing in this world now.

Howard's kid meanwhile had managed to get his residence in California bombed by … inviting terrorists to come find him. This boy was proving to at least be entertaining, James could admit that. He knew he should backtrack to the time when HYDRA had first subverted SHIELD, but it was frustrating and a mental drain and he wasn't ready for that yet. 

He clenched his hand to stop the involuntary twitching.

He did eventually go to pick up a book on Norse mythology, making note on what got the gods especially angry. That was always good to have a handle on, because if even the gods weren't happy, how could mortals expect to be at peace? That seemed to have triggered this mess in the first place.

In the evening he was back on the roof above the bar, looking at patrons from above. He'd know when he saw what we was looking for. His little shithead racketeer didn't show up, so James went to the building with the basement he'd seen the other day. He flagged a few people who came and went through the door. It was a bit pathetic, running a protection racket from a basement like this; he felt if he told anyone else they'd dismiss it as having seen this in a picture before. He just wondered why people were falling for it. 

On the way back to his hotel he cleaned out two drug dealers and threw them bodily into a police station, unconscious and trussed up. He took the money, not because he needed it, but because they didn't either and he could find better uses for it. Someone in the station had almost certainly seen him, but he was in his blacks with the hood up, he didn't care too much. 

The pinch in his left shoulder when he slipped through the window of his room was odd and not necessarily good news, but it was probably phantom pain that would go away eventually. Tomorrow it would be time to switch hotels again, shake anyone off his tail who might be there.

He didn't dream that night.

***

James knew he was dreaming when a heavy arm draped over his side, pulling him close. The so well-loved smell of Steve made him burrow in and Steve said something James couldn't understand … and then he opened his eyes to the light reflected in from the street.

"Fuck," he said to the empty room.

The next time he saw Dorothy was more than a week later and he had more clothes to present for the washer-dryer-cycle now, although some of them were stiff with mud and others had gotten blood on them where he'd not managed to evade a bullet. It had only been a graze, but it had still bled profusely until it had stopped. He'd barely even needed to clean it before it had healed off, though. 

Dorothy smiled at him and he went out to buy two coffees and a paper. He had tied his hair back to keep it out of his eyes and resemble the city's new vigilante even less. 

"Have you noticed that no one's seen him since what happened in Washington?" she asked him, pen poised over the crossword he'd pushed her way because it was in the world news section. He looked up with one eyebrow raised and show briefly glanced his way, indicating his sweater. "Cap."

James felt himself flush for half a second — it really was his only clean sweater and it might be getting too warm for sweaters, but with his arm that was the only option — before looking down at the page with the supermarket discounts. Grocery shopping was an exercise in patience, half the ingredients lists were riddles to him. Milk in boxes was a convenient invention, though. 

"I was always under the impression we only saw Captain America when America really was in trouble. I think not seeing him might be a good thing." And it wasn't like SHIELD was around to give him orders, either.

Dorothy hummed under her breath for a moment. "He's not King Arthur, James. But maybe you're right, we should let sleeping dogs lie. And we have the Dark Shadow these days."

"Aren't shadows always dark?" he murmured to dissemble and drank some of his coffee. Less sweet was still better, although luckily it was far from the burned mess they'd all drunk at the front just to keep their fingers from freezing. His finger twitched again and he tapped the table to distract himself from it.

"The press just needs a name, and since no one has actually seen his face they go with what they have," she argued and filled in 'LYNCH' into boxes in her neat handwriting. "We need more people stepping up for what's right."

He didn't answer, just read through the rest of the paper. 

When he later took his clothes from the dryer and shook them out, his laundry companion gave him a sharp look. The dark green hoodie had a hole where the bullet had passed through, and the woman had been an Army Nurse, seen these things a million times. "I'll darn it," he told her. "The Army is good about teaching how."

"You're not getting yourself into trouble, are you?" she asked, clearly resigned. For all that she knew him for only two laundry cycles, she'd been nice to him. He smiled and felt that he almost succeeded in making it believable.

"Nothing I can't possibly handle," he assured her. "Really. Promise."

"Just look out for yourself, you didn't come out of one war just to get yourself involved in another at home," she scolded and he tried to reassure her with another almost-smile. He couldn't say this to her, but unfortunately for people like him there often wasn't much choice.

He'd changed into something that wasn't a target on his chest and gone walking. It wasn't like he was looking for trouble, he just … managed to find it somehow. Like now, he was just walking past a school, kids of various ages on the other side of the street because the bell had just rung. A few hundred yards down the street, where most kids had been carted off by parents or vanished into school buses, someone leaned out of a blue van and snatched a ten year old boy off the curb. His scream was cut off after a split second and James could see how no one would have noticed this under different circumstances.

But James wasn't actively doing anything except walk the streets with what he hoped was an open mind, snatching at fragments of what might be memories real or imagined. He noticed. And what was he supposed to do, nothing?

His left hand wedged between the door and the frame just as it slammed shut and the satisfaction with which he crumpled the frame of the car was hard to replicate by anything else. He knew his grin was bordering manic when he opened the door and entered the van.

The boy was off to one side, gagged, red and tear stained face, he was cowering on the floor and James could hear her throat was about to close up from screaming behind the gag. The guy who'd dragged him in was too flabbergasted to do anything for a moment and then all he did try was to push James out of the car, yelling "Go, go, go!" at the top of his lungs to the driver. And go they did, but one well aimed push against the guy's head had him unconscious and James' knife was at the driver's throat in a second.

"And now we stop and pull up to the curb," he told the guy, who was hyperventilating already and slowly pulling to the side of the road. "Good. What did you want with him?"

Silence.

"Fine." He bashed the guy's skull against the wheel to knock him out. He trussed them both up with some rope he found in the back and knelt to untie the little boy. 

"Hey. What's your name?" he asked him as gently as he could. He used slow movements to check him for injuries but luckily couldn't find anything and then he pushed his hood back, strands of hair falling into his face and he pushed them back impatiently. 

"Charles," he cried and looked as if he didn't know what to do about him, whether to fling himself into his arms or run like hell. 

He sat cross legged on the floor. "Hi Charles, I'm … Steve. Do you know those men?" He shook her head. "Hm. Do you know what they wanted?" Another shake of head. "Okay. Look, we need to go to the police, okay?"

Charles nodded, tears slowly receeding. "My mom says not to go with strangers," he hiccuped, Brooklyn thick in his speech. 

"Yeah, your mom's real smart. But I'm not leaving you alone and we really need to tell the police. Okay? And we should take those two jokers with us, so I'll drive and you navigate. Deal?" He hoped to hell the boy could read maps, because James would be busy enough navigating traffic and this van without having to figure out where the station was. 

But Charles nodded, scrambling up already. 

"Brave boy," he praised and snatched a phone from one of the unconscious men to hand it to him. "Next police station. How are you doing in school, Charles?"

"Fine. Mrs. Bojangles makes us do fractions again. You need to take the next left."

James did a double take and stared at him where he was expertly tapping on the phone. "Her name is really Mrs. Bojangles?"

"Second right. Yes, it's funny isn't it?" He grinned at him, tears almost forgotten. "Now you stay on this street for a while."

"Got it. So you don't like fractions?" 

He crunched up his nose. "They're all right, but we already did them and I know how to do them, so why again?"

The two perps in the back started making noises and Charles froze up next to him. "Hey, Charles. Stay with me. Where do I need to go?"

Swallowing he looked back at the phone, hands shaking. "You pass the next intersection, then left and then it's on that street."

"Okay. And fractions, you know, they get more complicated, so maybe it's a good idea to repeat them. When I was in school we only did it once, and I had to practically beat up my best friend until he agreed they were useful." The memory came unbidden, but not unwelcome; Steve'd never had a head for math. That was also something the serum had fixed. 

"Why?" the boy next to him asked.

"He likes drawing better than numbers," he answered. He could see the sign indicating the station and pulled up several houses down. He turned to Charles. "Okay, look. I can't come in with you, but I want you to go in there and tell the nice policemen what happened to you. I'll stay here and watch until you're in. Okay?"

He nodded earnestly and slid out of the seat. Turning around several times to check that he was really still there, he gave him a thumbs up just before he entered the station. James looked around; the police would probably find some of his hairs, but with any luck this was a rental and they'd find a lot of DNA from a lot of people. Pulling his hood back up, he got out of the car and took to the rooftops. 

No movement at the protection racket basement that evening.

When James woke up the next day the first thing he noticed was that one of the joints of his hand was … stuck. It just wouldn't move anymore and while he could do some basic maintenance — fix a stuck plate here or there — he knew without even trying that this was beyond him. He cursed up a blue streak, took a shower and checked the time. Usually a single finger out of commission wasn't a problem for his work, but it was unfortunately rather obvious. He pulled on his gloves and went to find breakfast. 

That afternoon he went via rooftop to Charles' school. He spotted him immediately and followed him as he made his way home. No parents to pick him up was a bit strange after yesterday, but he'd known enough circumstances of kids having to raise themselves, it wasn't his place to assign blame. Then he noticed the car slowly following the boy as well, the driver and his passenger practically screamed cops undercover and that explained a lot. Nothing happened on his twenty minute walk home and when he arrived at her door, his mother hugged him tight. Before they went into the house, Charles turned and showed a thumbs up to the sky and James knew he had been made. Smiling, he shook his head and settled in to wait out the day in the sun on the roof. Sparrows were the only ones to keep him company.

He set the rest of his plan for the day in motion after dark. He crossed over the Bridge into Manhattan, avoiding other people as much as possible. Stark Tower — apparently to be renamed Avengers Tower at some point in the near future — was a monstrosity in the skyline, easily recognizable. The lights were slowly dropping off on the working floors as James settled in a few blocks away. He had some pizza and a milkshake while he waited. His stomach rumbled once, but remained quiet otherwise. 

After midnight he deemed it safe enough and made his way to the tower. He'd been there a couple of times during the day to look at it and scope it out in case it ever became necessary. He knew there was a side entrance that didn't lead to the lobby and he also knew about the AI guarding everything Anthony Stark. 

He sauntered up to that entrance and stood in front of it. "Is anyone home?"

"Sir, I take that question to be rhetorical," a voice with a distinctly British accent sounded ambiently from a hidden speaker. 

"Indeed. Do you know who I am?"

"Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 3255—"

"Okay," James said. "I don't suppose you have, well, authorization to let me in here? Without telling Steve?"

"My orders are to tell someone," the AI answered. 

Shrugging, James pulled his mouth down and gave it a shot. "Am I someone?"

Silence reigned for a moment and James imagined the AI whirring through his algorithms. "I don't see that contradicting my orders," it (he?) finally said. The door opened silently and he was directed to the elevators. The AI informed him of his own arrival.

"Thank you… Do you have a name?" If it was an AI, it was self-learning and if the guy was Howard's kid, of course it had a name.

"Mr. Stark calls me JARVIS, Sergeant Barnes," it answered. 

James nodded. "Okay. Look where should I go here?"

"The elevator is voice operated." JARVIS supplied.

Frowning, James looked for buttons. "Okay, but where do I go?"

"Who would you like to talk to?"

"Your creator, I guess. I have a bit of a problem with this arm of mine and I'd rather let him poke around in it than go back to where I came from." If he treated JARVIS just like another person, it should probably be okay. 

"Should I alert Mr.. Stark to your presence, then?" JARVIS politely inquired.

James considered. "No, actually I don't think that will be necessary."

"I see. I suggest you wait in his workroom then." 

If this was what Stark considered to be adequate security, James had severely underestimated the family name.

"Very well." The doors closed and James was whisked up in practically no time. Okay that was neat. When James stood in front of the glass door, it opened for him. "Will you require lights, Sergeant Barnes?"

"No, thank you, I have excellent night vision. Should I be in there?" He sure was curious.

"I have no instructions to the contrary." The door opened. If he didn't know better, James would have said that the AI was trolling its master. But then it was an AI, the question probably was whether AIs could develop a sense of humor, but maybe he should have that discussion with the man himself. 

Two robots James had seen in paper clippings stood around inactivated and to some extent in parts, looking somewhat sad for a reason James couldn't elucidate. He settled in to wait.

It turned out he didn't have to wait long, less than an hour later he saw movement through the door and then a man with dark hair who shared a lot more of Howard's features typed in a code and entered the room.

"Li—"

"Good evening Mr. Stark," James said evenly. "Having trouble sleeping?"

"How did you get in here? And JARVIS, raise the fucking lights." Illumination instantly brightened the room, clearly meant to blind James but it didn't. "I'd ask who you are, but that seems to be superfluous. How did you get in here?"

"Your AI likes me," James answered nonchalantly. "You need a better failsafe, apparently I count as someone."

The other man snorted. "Yeah, mostly because everyone knows the Capsicle would be ecstatic if you ever just walked in here. He's upstairs, you know? Want me to call him?"

James shook his head. "No. Mr. Stark—"

"Call me Tony," he interrupted, eying James surreptitiously.

James considered, one corner of his mouth raised. "Your father never offered his first name. At least not to me." Steve had been a different matter, but Steve had been very much Howard's creation. 

"I strive to be better than my dad." The answer was quick and Tony avoided eye contact, confirming some of what James had already been thinking anyway. 

"Always a good goal to have, but even you haven't managed a flying car yet as far as I can see," James shot back.

Tony laughed. "You should have a chat with a certain Phil Coulson some time. Ask him about Lola. So to what do I owe the dubious honor of your company, when Steve couldn't even find you, let alone bring you in?"

With a sigh James pulled off his gloves. "I've finally run into a little problem with this metal junkyard they attached to me. The last maintenance job was rushed and more of a make do than anything proper and now it seems to finally have given up." He'd not been half through the explanation when Tony was already bent over his arm, fingers careful and almost gentle. Howard's kid for sure. "Do you need a drool bucket or something?"

"Shut up, Skywalker, you messed up this beautiful piece of equipment that no one can replicate and now you're bringing it to me. Is it just the finger or something else? JARVIS, can we have some music here, whatever I'm currently trying to make Captain Frostbite appreciate." Tony was glib, but he was all business. James could appreciate that, but snorted at the moniker as low music started to play, something that he was almost sure had been popular in Europe in the 80s.

"Shoulder pinches where I think it's attached, but that's something I can live with." He flexed when Tony indicated to, except for the one finger. 

Tony frowned. "You probably messed up a neuromuscular junction or two somewhere. That's more Bruce' area of-"

James had seized him by the collar of his t-shirt within a second. "No. One. Learns that I was here."

Both arms raised in surrender, Tony moved back slowly when James released him. "Okay. But I'm a hardware guy. Neurosurgery? Not my forte. I'll try."

Nodding, James sat back and watched calmly as Tony grabbed a fine tool and started to pry apart the plates, humming along to the music. They opened willingly and Tony dug in, a magnifying glass on a holder between his eyes and the metal. "Got any idea which second rate car mechanic put that on you and butchered half your chest?"

"No, wasn't really part of that process." Images flashed in front of his mind, pain, a bloody stump, more blood, a bone saw. Choking someone to death. 

Tony saw his grit teeth and looked at the finger again. "I see. How did you manage this here? Natasha said in her debrief that she could incapacitate it with electricity, but this doesn't looks like electric damage."

"No," he answered, "this must be mechanic. I had a run in yesterday with two guys planning to abduct a little boy and then today it was stuck like this."

Something metallic clattered to the table. " _You_ are the Dark Shadow?! Oh my God. This is hilarious."

Briefly, James wondered if he'd lost it, but this was a Stark family trait. "What is? And what if I am?"

"Because our dear wonderful Cap up in his apartment, he hates that guy. Says he's giving law enforcement a bad name by showing them up. But you know, he has been going on and on about _you_ , because apparently you hung the moon when you were kids and now the two of you are the same person. Hah! Try to do this." He showed him, tapping each fingertip to the thumb. The stiff joint moved … a little. "Good. Getting there."

James rolled his eyes at Steve's assessment. "That's because Steve is the only one allowed to break any rules."

"You," Tony said, pointing the … whatever it was at him, a delighted grin on his face, "I like."

Dubious, James decided to take that as a compliment and keep his silence otherwise for the moment. Tony kept working, made him try things occasionally. It seemed to be working. 

"This really is a piece of beauty, you know. I've seen the specs that HYDRA had, and even they haven't managed to get all the details together. They'd need someone like me — or me, really — to replicate this, they'd never even figure out this alloy. " The man could talk a mile a minute.

"I think at least some of it is the same as the shield, when you shoot at this thing nothing ricochets." He could only supply what he knew from using it, but he'd been using it for seventy years, he was an expert.

"Huh." And then. "Cool. Try now." James flexed and it was working fine. "How's the shoulder?"

James shrugged. "Okay. Not perfect, but okay."

"Yes well. Look, can you come back? I get that you don't want to see Steve or have anyone know, that's cool. But I'd like to look some more at this - and maybe we can do something about that pain in your shoulder. Maybe your wiring needs updating. I need to look at the specs again." James knew that Tony had been a prisoner in a war that was his own merely by association and the man seemed to have learned enough about body language to try and use it on him now, palms out and putting it all on the table. 

"Do you have a gun range here?" he asked and saw Tony blink, clearly thrown off his game. Probably, James reflected, a man like Tony wasn't used to that but it was a testament to his intelligence that he seemed to be able to switch gears quickly enough.

"We have two master assassins on the team, I can do better than a gun range," the man drawled, which James simply answered with a shrug. Grumbling, Tony snatched something that looked suspiciously like a hand from a table and gestured. "Follow me. JARVIS, do we have anyone on the premise?"

"Everyone in residence is asleep, sir," the AI answered immediately.

"You check up on everyone?" James asked, not sure how comfortable he was with that sort of information.

But Tony shook his head. "Not really. No cameras unless we're at DEFCON 1, they can ask JARVIS to remove his presence completely. But it's not like he's interfering and in moments like this it's quite handy. Not all of them live here, anyway."

No news was good news, James figured and didn't ask after Steve. That would have invited, justifiably, more questions than he was willing to answer right now, probably than he was able to. He still hadn't really thought about Steve outside of tangents. He— He couldn't. Steve was a large dark shape in his mind that his brain shied away from and he could admit, if only to himself, that he was afraid. Plain and simple. He wasn't sure of what because he'd dealt with pain for so long that it was second nature, but he also knew that brains weren't always logical. Looking at Tony's back walking ahead of him in the middle of the night through the silent and only indirectly illuminated hallways of Stark Tower was proof enough of that.

"I'll have JARVIS generate a code for you," his host eventually said, coming to a stop in front of a reinforced door, typing something into a keypad. "You can come here without me, just ask him to direct you."

James didn't say anything. He wasn't planning to be back at the Tower on the regular, but he wasn't going to tell that to Tony. 

The far wall of the room held a weapons rack, which alone said a lot about the inhabitants of this place, considering Tony had removed the company from the international weapon's market. Most still bore his company's logo. James raised an eyebrow at that.

"Not for the open market," Tony informed him. "After all that's happened the last few years we should be prepared. And I like to know my weapons are working. Knock yourself out."

He stood back and let James have some room. Without a word he selected a 9 mm and ammo. He didn't even need to look at the gun as he checked it over his fingers were telling him all he needed to know, the state of care, the maintenance of the mechanism. Tony's workroom might be an organized chaos, but these weapons were as meticulously cared for as the tools that were strewn about. 

Sliding the loaded clip in he felt the click more than heard it. His breathing evened out as he stepped up to the barricade. A pair of earmuffs way off to the side but he ignored them, flipped off the safety, pulled back the slide, aimed and fired. Two shots between heartbeats, two more, and again until he knew the next time it would click empty. Reloading without a word he put the whole magazine into the paper target without pause, a few seconds and then it was over. 

James let out a long breath.

"Perfect score," Tony's quiet voice drifted over to him and he knew the man had done it to alert him to step up. This sort of behavior made James wonder about the state of mind of the other people using this place. "Want to see a neat trick?"

Clearly waiting for an answer was beyond Tony Stark, who stepped up, raised his gauntleted right hand and let an energy bolt fly, practically frying the target James had used. 

"Impressive."

Tony grinned like a kid for a moment before sobering up. "So will you let me look at the arm again?"

A rueful smile escaped James before he looked once more to where the target had been before being obliterated before disassembling the gun and putting it back where he'd found it.

"I'll be back," he simply said and went for the door when a badly suppressed laughter held him back.

"Sorry," Tony said, raising his hands, helplessly snickering. "The way you said that. I don't. You need to see some movies. I know Cap has a list, I should get you a copy."

Shaking his head, James went to the door. He was sure there was a streak of madness running in the Stark family. Pausing once more with his hand on the door latch he turned around to see Tony inspect the gauntlet in his hand. "Stark."

"Hm?" The other man looked up.

"I wouldn't be too worried about living up to your old man."

The Tony he left at the range was blinking and slack faced and James smirked, letting JARVIS direct him to the elevator and out of the building.

***

The last thing James felt before his vision went red was the knife going in his back and plunging straight into his left kidney.

The first thing he saw was the bloody mess that was left of the man with the knife. He blinked down at it, knew he should feel disgust at himself, fear at being caught with a dead body under his knees. None of it came. He could still feel warm blood trickling down his back, soaking his clothes in addition to the rain had steadily been falling all day. He was straddling a corpse that was only so much meat anymore. 

He should probably feel sick.

He was also bleeding out. 

The knife was lying next to the dead man, still red with James' own blood mixing with the rain. He collected it and then raised himself up gingerly, wincing as his muscles flexed. His hotel was only a few blocks away, but there was no way he would reach it on street level without being accosted, even in this neighborhood. Swallowing, he closed his eyes for a moment, got his breathing and his heartbeat under control, pressed a hand to the wound through his clothes. The sensors in the cybernetic arm weren't sensitive enough to pick up on how bad it was, but the steady warm trickle down his legs, easily distinguished from the rain, was enough to clue him in.

Climbing up the rain pipe was an exercise in self-control; it was slick and James hurt. By now he was almost sure the Winter Soldier had been programmed to ignore pain unless it suited his handlers. The Soldier could be fixed, repaired, put into stasis until his injuries had healed. But James was a person again; needs and wants, essentials and little luxuries piling up inside of him, and pain was a luxury that people had. A luxury, and a liability in moments like this. He heaved himself up to the roof panting and summoned the energy to make the jump to the next building and the next. From where he didn't know.

He was so. Very. Done. By the time he slid down the gutter pipe to slip into his hotel room on the fourth floor of a badly-maintained building from the 20s that he almost didn't make it into the bathroom where he'd stashed just-in-case first aid supplies. After that first encounter with a bullet he'd learned to keep some things on hand. He fumbled a roll of bandages and almost dropped them to the floor before he took off his sweater and picked up a washcloth to wipe at the blood. It wasn't gushing anymore, but there was a steady trickle.

Every move hurt. He taped some gauze over the wound with difficulty, operating with the mirror as an aid and his head turned back, which made him see color flecks and develop vertigo. He taped a whole roll of gauze over that first layer for compression and then wrapped elastic tape around his entire midsection as fast and as tight as he could. All that was left was hoping that whatever prevented him from getting drunk was just as fast in catching up with tissue damage, infection and blood loss. Intellectually he knew the Winter Soldier had been in some scraps in the field, there was shrapnel damage on his thigh that had been bad enough to leave a scar despite the healing factor, but he didn't actually _remember_ that.

Exhausted and in pain, he collapsed face down on the bed, taking as much strain off the wound as he was able to. Perversely, he wished the last thing he thought of before he fell asleep or let unconsciousness roll over him — he wasn't sure what it was — would have been Steve's bloody face looking up at him and the knowledge that with him he hadn't lost control. In truth he thought that Dorothy had been wrong, this was not something he had brought on himself.

He woke up to twilight and a cottony feeling in his mouth, grit in his eyes. He swallowed but couldn't seem to produce enough spit, his muscles and even the metal arm felt weak when he pushed himself up. His breath came in short bursts and he had to think for a moment where he was. James had spent enough time at the front to recognize dehydration, but it took a lot of willpower and convincing himself to actually want to go to the bathroom.

Walking hurt, his joints had seized up, his jeans were sticking to him with dried mud and blood. He turned on the faucet and cupped the water in hands still red with blood, drinking in large gulps before he let himself sink down on the toilet seat, head in hand. He felt the gauze package pressing into his back, but no pain from that particular spot. After several more minutes, he took another drink of water before doing anything about it.

Gingerly he unrolled the elastic from around his thorax and stomach. It was partially bled through, but not soaked, stiff and dry only in some places in the back. The gauze package was a red blister on the mirror. He released the strips of tape holding it in place, let it slide into the sink and wet the washcloth again before removing the thin layer of gauze also. His back was a mess of red, no one would have been able to distinguish flesh from skin and he briefly contemplated a shower before using the damp cloth to wipe at the blood. He didn't want to irritate any unhealed wounds.

The place where the knife had slid in was still tender, looked raw and only partially healed, but shallow. James still felt sluggish and tired, weak in a way he only ever had after getting his brains scrambled, but he didn't think he was still bleeding internally. He had no way of knowing whether the twilight he'd seen was dusk or dawn, but it didn't really matter. He gulped down more water, feeling almost sick and then stumbled back to the bed to catch more sleep. 

The next time he woke it was full dark. "Fuck," he told the empty room. At least he wasn't dreaming. He'd no way of knowing how much time had passed, he know he should be worried about DNA evidence at the scene, about being made. Ultimately it was impossible; he'd trust on the rain and the fact that he hadn't gone anywhere for treatment.

He tested his muscles and joints and found he felt better. He also needed to piss, which he took as a good sign, but his urine was dark and strongly laced with blood, a condition he would have to watch. He had more water and his stomach made itself known. His wound looked still pink and new, but it seemed like he had cheated death this time around.

Either way though, it was past time he changed hotels again. He took a shower, careful with the left side of his back, then bound back his hair and put on a clean set of clothes, put up the hood. His possessions were still meager, but the sports bag looked adequate now as he left the key on the table before exiting through the window. The alley downstairs was empty and it was already or still dark, which would leave him enough time to find a new place to stay. New York City luckily didn't lack for rundown accommodations where people didn't ask too many questions and weren't surprised when they never saw their 'guests'. 

He found a diner open 24/7 and bought — coffee and eggs, found an abandoned paper on the counter. It was three days since he'd been stabbed. Or maybe that was yesterday.

That morning he watched Charles head to school, then burned his blood soaked jeans, gloves and hoodie in the corner of another roof, deeming them beyond saving, before heading into a department store for a new outfit. It was shocking how normal this sort of thing felt and how he didn't have to remind himself to check for booby traps behind every display, and he smiled a bit at his own realization. Eventually he'd need clothes that weren't jeans and hoodies, he felt he wanted back into combat gear, use some of the skills he had for more than thugs on the street, but for the very moment he liked looking out for only himself and no one to pay him much mind.

That evening he checked on his protection racket, noticing no new faces but following one of them to another establishment. In total they seemed to have ten places on their roster, all of them bars that had seen better times but had been around at least twenty years. He didn't know yet where this was going but it seemed to be a pattern. 

His back complained after one particularly stretchy jump half an hour later, and the only reason he did reach the other roof was his training forbidding him to flinch away from the pain. So maybe he wasn't completely healed. 

He made his way into Manhattan, picking up hot dogs and water on the way, arriving at the Tower long past an hour when decent people should be in bed.

"JARVIS, is anyone up?" he asked, trying to sound casual about talking to the door. People probably did it all the time here.

"Mr. Stark and Miss Potts are the only people currently occupying the tower, Sergeant. Mr. Stark is in his workroom. Would you like to go up?" The AI answered without any emotional inflection and even though this was only the second time James dealt with it (him?), he was glad to know some things didn't change. 

"That would be great, yes, thank you." JARVIS directed him to the same elevator as last time, asked if he should let Tony know that James was coming and he agreed. The element of surprise was ruined either way. 

"Vegas Boy!" Tony called and waved him in. "I didn't think I'd see you again quite this quickly. Come in, come in."

Truth be told, neither had James, but after his adventure the past few days and his still aching back he'd figured if he was bleeding out internally he should probably do it somewhere where no one would call paramedics or the coroner on him. He was sure Tony had ways and means to get rid of unwanted dead bodies of top-secret assassins somewhere. 

Before James could even open his mouth to reply Tony continued, "Is that the same outfit as last time?"

Slightly taken aback, James narrowed his eyes. In fact, it was not because that one had gone up into smoke a few hours ago. "And if it was? I can't wear my Captain America sweater on the streets, it's like a target on my chest."

Tony smirked at that. "You have a Captain America sweater?"

"It's for laundry day," James returned nonplussed and went to sit on the same stool as last time. The wound didn't hurt but it was noticeable, and he tried his best to walk normal. "You said you wanted a look at this thing."

"I still do. Strip for me." James waggled his eyebrows and tried a smirk of his own. It had to be working for the next thing Tony said was, "Oh baby, if I'm that irresistible to super soldiers, I'm seeing all of Steve's actions in a whole new light."

Snorting, he started to take off his hoodie by the back of the neck, then took his arms down again, looking at Tony and making sure the other man new he meant it. He put a measured dose of venom into his voice and said, "Don't touch me. You get to play with the arm but. Do. Not. Touch. Me."

"Promises, promises." Nodding his understanding, Tony stood back a carefully measured distance as James stripped down and dropped the garment unceremoniously on the floor. Not saying anything for a while, Tony stepped around him, looking at him from all sides and angles. James knew when his gaze lingered on the fresh scar, but he still didn't say anything; he then stepped up to a console and brought up a holographic display.

"This is what we have from HYDRA. Or well, what I could put together from what HYDRA had, which is still worlds more than the average techie will be able to cobble together. JARVIS will keep scanning you and adding to the schematic as necessary, so don't be surprised if this shifts." Tony was down to business, but at the same time this was his element, so James let him do as he pleased and tried to relax enough so his back wouldn't seize up. "Has this ever come off, does it detach?"

"I'm sure they updated it from the original, but I can't really tell you anything, I don't think I was awake then. I think if you want to take it off half my torso comes with it." Tony hummed and ran his fingers over the plates almost gently, then used the same tool as last time to pop them open, but on a bigger scale. It was the first time James had actually been interested in seeing the insides of what was going on. All he could see was a mess of wires that didn't make sense to him, though.

"Oh baby, you're not going easy on your hydraulics, are you? And these poor servos, you can't abuse them like this. They might be made of mystery alloy, but they're still subject to wear and tear." In the end, James was almost sure Tony wasn't really talking to him, but that the running commentary helped him think. The holographic display was indeed changing and he focused on that more than anything until some of what Tony was mumbling was filtering down to him. "I mean it though if you need money—"

There was something to be said about generosity, though James had never quite associated it with the Stark family name. "HYDRA paid for my services."

"They did?" Tony looked up in surprise from where he was tracing a wire that lit up on the display. It didn't hurt, but he did have some sort of sensation in it, however that was possible.

James shrugged with his right shoulder. "I figured, couple dozen assassinations, seventy years of overtime, compensation for personal suffering, I deserved a cut. I took my due and left the rest for whoever would pick up the pieces of that particular carcass."

"Smart," Tony said with a lopsided smile, concentration back on the innards of the arm. "That means you can still use what they taught you, if you managed to hack into those accounts."

"Some." He didn't need to volunteer what was there and what wasn't, the footage from when Triskelion collapse should be useful enough as evidence. 

The other man sat back, tool twirling in his hand. "How much do you remember? There was more than just your time as the Winter Soldier. I grew up hearing stories about you."

Though it remind unsaid, the 'and Cap' was all the louder, but James appreciated it anyway. 

"Some," he repeated, then raked his free hand through his hair. "I wouldn't be able to tell you. Also from … active duty in between. I never know what's there and what's not until something triggers it. I can't recall most of it at will unless I know it's there, but ask me a question and chances are I might be able to tell you."

To articulate this much took effort and he had to halt a few times, looking for the right phrase; he'd never tried to put what was going on in his head into words. He didn't even know why he told Tony. He just felt he should tell someone, and at least Tony knew who he was — had been, should be, could be — in a city where no one else did.

For a minute Tony just looked at him, then returned his attention to his newest project and popped the plates of the upper arm open, too. No wires there, just circuit boards. The elbow joint was kind of cool, and he spent a few minutes trying to understand how the mechanism worked smoothly without audible noise. He didn't quite get it, but Tony seemed quite happy with his discovery.

That was why he was mildly surprised when the man spoke up again. "Did you kill my parents?"

James stared for several long heartbeats, unable to come up with any answer at all. It was clever, Tony had him — quite literally — open and exposed and he had nowhere to go. And still it was a quite fair question. He shook his head. "No."

"Direct question, direct answer?" Tony quipped and looked at him for half a second before turning away.

James shook his head again. "Bluntly put, they would not have thawed me out when they wanted to let it look like an accident. Your father was always reckless; he was the one to fly Steve out behind Nazi lines. I can't imagine he got any more careful just because they made him head of SHIELD."

"Looked that up, did you?"

"I've had some time on my hands." Tony nodded as if he got it. "I'm sorry about Howard," he added, trying for a more gentle tone.

"I've had some time to deal with it. And dad… He needed an heir more than he needed a kid. I think we'd get on pretty well now, actually." James didn't say anything, just looked at Tony's half-profile and imagined what a lonely childhood it must have been. They'd never had the kind of riches that Tony had been born into, but at least they'd never been lonely or unloved. He tried to flex when Tony indicated and saw the arm's innards at work for the first time. "Cool eh? So you and Cap… Ever going to actually talk to him?"

"Not right now." Was all James said and hoped that was enough, but of course he should have known Tony better by now.

"You know, no one is asking you to repent or anything. History tells a pretty clear picture and this information dump has done the rest." 

"Tony." The man looked at him, unashamed and calculating. "I'm getting to Steve. Later."

"Yeah, most of the time I don't know what to do with the guy either, that's why everyone's off investigating something with Erik. Having Wilson to do air support, I thought I could stay out of it. Well everyone but Bruce, he's communing with nature in the Mojave desert. There, all done. I want to pop that shoulder open, look at the gears, but to be honest I still haven't gotten around to that neurosurgery class. Come back in a few days. I did clean the fine mechanics, let me know if it doesn't feel right." After a beat where the plates zipped shut. "You do have sensation, don't you?"

"Enough," James answered and pulled on his sweater again. His wound felt fine and he probably wasn't in danger of dying right there on the table. "Don't wait up for me."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

James nodded and was almost through the door when he heard, "B— Ja— Sergeant Barnes!" He turned around, not bothering to correct the man on any of his attempts. "I want you to know you have a place here, if you want it, quite aside from the Capsicle wanting me to give you one."

Not bothering to respond, James left the room and tracked back to the elevator.

"JARVIS?"

"Yes, Sergeant?" the AI responded immediately

"Did he put any trackers inside of this thing?" He imaged he had a pretty good handle on Tony, and the man would, given the opportunity. The question was whether he had any respect for privacy.

"No, Sergeant. And Sergeant?"

"Yes, JARVIS?"

"Your kidney seems to be working within normal parameters."

James breathed in and out before answering, "Thank you, JARVIS."

"You're welcome, Sergeant."

***

In trying to keep a regular schedule — meaning whenever he ran out of things to wear that at least looked clean — James went to do laundry the next day. As always the place was almost empty, except for Dorothy and him. Outside it was turning well and truly into early summer, but the AC kept the place at ambient temperatures.

Dorothy asked his input on her crossword after a while, and he noticed that she had trouble holding the pen. She also didn't walk so well, so James picked up a few things for her while their things were washing and then made sure to put her in a cab home. He wished her a swift recovery and put a few bills in the driver's hands. He thought she might have had tears in her eyes but didn't dare to check. 

News about the Dark Shadow was slow but still kept trickling in whenever James _did_ something. He wasn't particularly hiding anymore, although he still didn't provoke being seen. His superior speed and reflexes gave him that confidence, although that knife in the kidneys had made him be more careful. He wondered if the attack had been as random as it had seemed or if he'd missed a tail somehow. But unless someone else came after him he'd probably never know. It did serve to remain vigilant.

James saw Charles home that day and matters on that front seemed to have calmed down at least. No one had come after him since that first time, and most likely it had just been one more random act of violence of which there were so many every day. He'd still check on him from the rooftops, just to be on the safe side.

By now he had all men actively involved in the groundwork of the protection racket, but he still wasn't sure on the ones behind the scenes. Which was why the next few days he reversed his schedule and sat on the roof, watching anyone who came and went, watching the establishments involved, sleeping during the day. He didn't go drinking there anymore. 

Ever since his kidney's unfortunate rendezvous with the knife, he'd been sleeping on the bed. Beds were too soft and blankets too restrictive, but he found he now could sleep on them and they were marginally cleaner than the floors. Something good had come of that incident after all, or at least he James chose to consider it as such.

He'd dreamed about the fight he and Steve had on the carrier. The way Steve had insisted on who he was, insisted Bucky had known him all his life, after he got him out from under the beam that should have killed him. He'd never wondered how it had been for Steve, waking up in a world that had continued to turn without him in it, only to much later find a piece that should have been gone before Steve himself. 

The mirror still showed him the same face, only cleaner, less tired, shaved with only a small shade of stubble. Hair fell into his face and he tucked it behind his ear with the metal hand. No matter who he was, the face didn't change. It was a small solace, but James was grasping at straws.

The next time he let himself fall onto his customary stool in Tony's lab, he brought a bottle of imported lager. Without prompting, he pulled off his shirt. By now it really was too hot in the city to go about in sweaters, and the thin sheen of sweat he'd worked up navigating the streets in the heat of a city summer dried quickly, leaving behind blessed chill. 

"Did you bring that to lube things up, socially?" Tony inquired and set out a bunch of tools he hadn't used before.

"No touching," James reminded him. "You don't actually mind, do you?" He raised the bottle to indicate what he was speaking of.

"Nope, though I have better in the fridge." He grabbed the tool to pop up the plates. "JARVIS, bring up the display. Okay, full disclaimer: I've only done this virtually. You have to tell me the second you feel anything off, because neither of us did the wiring on this beautiful piece of technology. Deal?"

"I'm never quite sure if you just consider me the necessary attachment when you want to spend quality time with the arm." But James dutifully looked at the display and saw how suddenly switchboards appeared that looked — organic.

"That's a mystery for the ages, Freezerburn. This is so cool, you have no idea. Do you know if they replaced anything else? Your shoulder blade is a given and I guess your clavicle was a goner after they did the first tests on this, it could never have stood the strain. Your scans show that. How heavy does it feel, though, does it get worse when you add velocity to the mix?" Tony was clearly excited .

James shrugged tiredly. "I mostly just use it, Tony." Still, he did his best to give him answers, but he couldn't really make any statements regarding his bone status, it wasn't like he'd been asked for permission.

"So he's given up looking for me?" he asked after long minutes of Tony just updating his hologram, poking around inside in a way that James could actually feel. He wasn't sure it was uncomfortable, but it was … weird. He flinched when something gave a zap of electricity as feedback.

Tony paused for a moment; James didn't check his expression, just kept flipping the bottle. "No, but I asked him to come back. After all, he's a good little soldier who follows orders, especially when they come from the man bankrolling this whole operation." 

"What does Pepper put into your coffee pot these days?" James asked, trying hard not to laugh. 

Tony came around to grab for two different tools and smirked. "Okay, fine, you know the guy. Tell me if this does anything." A high pitched spike of pain shot down the arm that wasn't there and straight into his brain. James hissed. "Sorry. So those are connected. Interesting. I was right, by the way, you fried something back here. As for Cap, I might have made the case that something was about to happen. Maybe it is. Maybe that's the PTSD speaking."

James was quiet for a while; he didn't really want to get to the bottom of Tony's psychological issues. He barely had the capacity for the mess in his own head, he couldn't deal with Tony Stark. Instead, he decided to change the topic. Somewhat.

"Have you ever tried to order the Black Widow around, since you are _bankrolling this operation_?"

Tony broke out into a coughing fit. "Gods no. That woman is scary, I want her to not notice me most of the time."

James laughed and Tony proceeded to explain more about what the hologram was showing. "I'm actually pretty confident that we can upgrade this thing eventually and have some spare parts in case we need them."

"Is that likely?"

"You're using it more now, especially in an everyday fashion, than you used to when you were in cryo. No matter what kind of material they've used, it'll wear down eventually. I guarantee you that much and I'm an expert in robotics." It was a very matter of fact conversation and Tony didn't hesitate before saying the word 'cryo'. Here, in this lab or workshop or whatever it was supposed to be, he felt comfortable. He asked Tony to use the shooting range again, but this time the man didn't keep him company.

That night he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling of his hotel room and thought about Steve before James had gone off to war. He knew that incarnation of Steve best and James had been just a regular guy back then, with a reckless best friend. It was the version of himself he knew best, too; a regular guy with a regular job that put enough food on the table and then some, with all the time in the world to decide what to do with the rest of his life.

The draft letter had cut that time incredibly short and the orders for Europe—

Steve had managed to mostly grow out of his asthma attacks by the time his mother died, which was a relief to Bucky, because it was one less thing to worry about. His friend had never been healthy, and more than once when they were kids James had thought for sure Steve would not be alive anymore the next day, but he'd always pulled through. The scary times seemed to finally be over, and while Steve would never be a big, strong guy, he wouldn't choke anymore just because his lungs refused to take in air. James had lost count, stopped counting really, the times he'd spent nights in the hospital or curled up next to Steve while he was burning up, in defiance of all rules set by parents and doctors.

He'd only ever wanted to keep Steve safe, not that his friend was overly interested in that. He'd been jealous of James receiving training for war, tried again and again to enlist and James in turn had tried to get him to stop. But their friendship had been cemented by the age of five and never in a million years would James have let that go.

With a sigh he turned on his side and closed his eyes. He hadn't written Steve letters from Europe the way the others had done to their wives and girls and families back home. Before shipping out, James had believed his country to be invincible, to be invincible himself, and only at the front he'd found out that invincibility came at a cost. Wars were won and lost with a currency minted from blood, tears, eviscerated bodies and torn limbs and that was not something James could tell to Steve, who he had left in the relative safety of their hometown.

He should have known that would never be enough for Steve Rogers.

***

A few evenings later, he decided it was time to finally put an end to the protection racket. He'd tried to do some more research, but he still hadn't managed to figure out why they targeted the places they did. By now James knew all of the men involved by now, from the lowly runner to the two heads, who seemed to be brothers. Over the last few days of observation he had also determined that just scaring them probably wasn't enough.

The hoodie he dressed in was a size smaller than he should have picked, but left less fabric to be grabbed and used against him. His customary knives he slid into his boots and strapped to his hip, three of the guns he'd taken from various small fry criminals over the weeks and months went to his thigh, under his clothes at his side, holstered hidden at his other hip. 

He didn't truly expect to get into much of a scrap; these sorts of criminals were too full of themselves and too used to solve things with money to put up much opposition, but he still taped his knees for support. None of it would do much for protection — bullets or the edges of knives — he'd have to rely on agility and luck. 

Past midnight, when all the little runners had returned home to roost, James made his move. Without so much as crunching grit beneath his boots he dropped from the roof right next to the stairs to the basement. The door was reinforced steel, but James had infiltrated HYDRA bases and taken down sturdier things than a door. One well aimed kick and it swung open, and he was inside a room that was too crowded with the eight people already gathered in it.

"Now this is pathetic," he proclaimed, because they were playing poker. With the money they had collected from the proprietors of those bars. James pulled a gun. "This has gone on long enough guys. You, all of you, are going to get up and walk with me to the next police station and turn yourselves in."

It could have been so easy. It _should_ have been so easy, but nothing in James' life went ever according to plan. One of the brothers had just opened his mouth when there was a low metallic ping and the little basement room filled with acrid smoke faster than even James could react. Coughing, he decided to push this particular fight to a different day and betook himself outside, gulping in large amounts of clean air.

From the corner of his eye he saw the young guy, Joe from the bar, standing to the side. Huh. Before he could question it any further, a tank slammed into his side and he rolled over, took the momentum to land back on his feet, ribs smarting. A quick hand down his side told him nothing was broken and only then he noticed a far too familiar star spangled uniform. 

He hesitated.

Those seconds' hesitation seemed to be enough for Steve to decide and he came at James, hurling the shield at him. James ducked away, rolled, came to a stand and seriously contemplated just taking off, but Steve must have anticipated that move because he was already there, feigning left but going right, a move aimed to incapacitate James and bring him in. Unfortunately for Captain America, James knew his signature moves and could anticipate them, getting his blocks up before Steve could hit anything.

He was holding back, they both were; James couldn't afford for his friend to notice the arm, Steve thought he was hitting your run of the mill human and probably didn't mean to kill him. He let himself drop and pulled Steve with him with a hand in his uniform, forced him on his stomach and pushed himself back to his feet. Steve was up again within a split second, trying to get a look at his face.

"Showing up the police, pretending to be on the people's sides and then demanding they pay you for 'protection'," Steve spat and James rolled his eyes. He tried to use the momentary distraction to extricate himself from the alley, but unfortunately that wasn't working.

The other men from the basement had spilled out by now as well, assisted none too gently by … Iron Man. Of course. 

He couldn't say anything, though, not with Steve coming at him again. It felt like a good, hard workout, but James knew the stakes were higher, should be higher, and he also could see he was making Steve angry. He took a hit to the face and grazed Steve's ear in turn.

"Cap," the tinny, speaker enhanced voice of Tony sounded in a warning tone.

James tried to get Steve in the solar plexus just to get him to lay off for half a second, but he hit the shield instead. With his flesh and blood hand, that actually hurt.

"Cap," Tony repeated, more insistent.

"Not now, Tony," Steve said, barely out of breath, and started pressing his advantage again. He tried to back James into the dead end of the alley, make him give up because he was out of space. He dropped, rolled, tried to take out Steve's feet but failed, got the courtesy of the shield being slammed into his shoulder instead, right onto the scar. 

It _hurt_.

James grit his teeth against the pain and against the pain affecting him, because Steve was grabbing for his hood, straining to unmask him. Rolling away, he felt stiff but made it back to his feet, rolled his shoulder to alleviate the sensation. He was almost sure he was bleeding. 

"Cap!" Tony yelled, having restrained the guys from the basement with zip cuffs.

James shot him a quick look, panting as Steve came back towards him. The only other time he'd seen him this mad had been after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and that was saying something. 

The shield was thrown his way again and he blocked it with his left wrist. The movement jarred his shoulder and he hissed, cursed in five different languages just as Tony removed the face shield and yelled, "Steve!"

That action distracted Steve for a second as he turned around to his companion. James knew it was his only opening; he found hand and footholds in the wall next to him and scaled the building, rested for five seconds on top and then used the rooftops to navigate to his hotel. He wasn't dumb, he knew Steve could have followed him but obviously chose not to for some reason. James was thankful for small favors, but still took several detours.

When he arrived at his hotel, he was exhausted, but still chose to appraise the damage. His shoulder was indeed bleeding and patched it up just in case, he had an already dark purple bruise on his side and his eye was swelling shut. The wrist on his cybernetic arm didn't move as it should. Well. So much for earnest sparring with Steve and the man holding back.

The next day was laundry day, and the amount of blood he had to wash out of his clothes recently was simply ridiculous. His shoulder still hurt and his eye was no longer swollen shut but mottled in a deep purple. Dorothy gave him a very telling glance.

"You won't believe it, but my best friend did this," he told her.

She sipped her coffee and filled in the crossword. "Indeed I don't."

"We had a bit of a misunderstanding." She nodded her head. "My mom used to do that, too, when I came home all busted up."

"Did that happen a lot?" she inquired and gave him a smile.

Looking down at the table where the paper was spread out unread, he smiled back ruefully. "Yeah. Mostly due to no fault of my own though."

"Said best friend, I presume." He nodded. "The two of you must have been a menace."

"Oh yes. We still are." Because if James looked like this, he assumed Steve was no better. Dorothy looked nothing short of indulgent and turned back to her crossword. 

Ultimately, James had no choice but to show up at the Tower again that evening. 

"You're getting to be a regular here, Robocop, not that I'm complaining mind you," Tony greeted him while two robots rolled over, inspecting James curiously.

He tilted his head and held out his flesh and blood hand out to one of them. "Steve busted my arm, the wrist will barely move. I see you reanimated your pets."

One of them made a noise that sounded almost offended.

Tony looked at him with reproach. "They also have feelings, you know? Off you two, go be a menace elsewhere." The robots rolled off with dejection in their posture and if that wasn't weird… Well, James was sitting in Tony Stark's workshop. "I had them in the kitchen upstairs until now, but they were getting underfoot a little with Thor here at the moment."

"Do they cook?" James stripped off his sweater to show the damage and Tony sucked in a breath.

"If they're told to; Dummy manages passable pancakes if they don't all end up on the ceiling. Does that hurt?"

Grimacing, James peeled the bandage off the shoulder wound. "That shield is as hard as it's made out to be."

"I'm not made for blood," Tony stated and went to stand behind him. "I actually think you should get that sutured, and I'm not the person to do it."

The only answer James was willing to give was to shake his head and Tony sighed, popped the plates from shoulder to wrist, bringing up the hologram. For a long while he worked in silence, comparing schematics with what he was seeing and made dismayed noises. James dug inside himself to find the patience to sit still, contemplating his more immediate future until something occurred to him.

"Why do Captain American and Iron Man concern themselves with a low level protection racket?" That was what had been most puzzling about this whole affair, really.

"One of Agent Carter's nurses' brother was involved in it, apparently, and wanted out. She appealed to Steve when he was there last time. You remember Agent Carter?" It sounded casual when James knew it was anything but.

"Peggy. Wouldn't give me the time of day when she first met me." He hissed when Tony touched something that sent a spike of pain down his spine that vanished as soon as it had appeared when he stopped doing whatever he was doing. "She liked Steve, so she deigned to notice me eventually and we got on pretty well in the years after that. I don't blame her; half the men only saw her as a piece of ass, most others wouldn't accept a woman commanding them. Howard actually tried to hit on her."

Something clattered to the floor. "You're telling me … Peggy Carter could have been my mom?" 

He sounded scandalized. James decided to top that. "Actually, Steve could have been your dad, he told me your mom was sweet on him. Actually, most of the SSR was sweet on Steve at some point."

All movement behind him stopped completely. "I need a drink," Tony said eventually. " _Steve_ , oh Lord."

James snickered, but decided to give it a rest for the moment. That had been one of the better days during the war, he'd needed to be debriefed at SSR temporary HQ and Steve had wanted to talk to Howard. Steve might have been an USO showgirl and used to attention but thought things at the front were different. James had laughed at him for an hour and then taken him drinking, telling him about the black humor, bad coffee and cheap cigarettes that kept them going out there.

After a while Tony came around and looked at the wrist. "We need to completely replace the hydraulics here, they're out of alignment. You're lucky I made spares by now, since you didn't give me the arm to play with for a while. They're not the originals, but adamantium should serve the same purpose."

James looked at him dubiously. "How hypothetical is that 'should'?"

Shrugging, Tony plugged out a dented looking piece of miniature machinery. "There's no reason it shouldn't?"

"That sounds reassuring," James said and sighed. His wrist was completely immobilized now and he had to force himself to keep still.

"Hey, One Armed Bandit, you're getting free service for your equipment here so don't complain." Tony shook what looked like a screwdriver at him in what was probably supposed to be a threatening gesture. James didn't think the needed to apologize. 

A long time later, after Tony had donned a pair of watchmaker's glasses, he said to James' hand, "He's not doing so well, you know."

In the whole world, there was only one 'he' this could be about. "Did I injured him badly?"

"His ear made him look permanently embarrassed all day, which was hilarious, but I expect the opportunity to tease him about it will be gone by tomorrow. Not what I meant, though." He looked up to check James got it, then down again. James couldn't find a single word to say that didn't sound pathetic or explained things he didn't have words for. When it was clear nothing was forthcoming, Tony continued. "For a while when I was little, Cap was my idol, because dad was always talking about him, and he was a hero, you know? I only found out later that dad actually knew him and he was talking about him because he was actually _looking_ for him. Cap here, Cap there, Steve Rogers this, take an example, Steve Rogers that. It bordered on obsession, he cared about a dead man more than his own kid and for a time I wondered if something had been going on there."

James let out a bitter laugh at that image. "Steve never slept with your father."

Tony kept grumbling.

"I did."

At that, he could see Tony dig his fingers into the innards of his arm, yanking at wires and the intensity of the pain was excruciating. 

"Fuck, Tony, that was a joke, stop pulling, my nerves are attached to those things! Fuck you, get your sausage fingers out of there, you savage!" James kept cursing, lapsing into Russian for a moment until Tony finally let go. 

"That was payback." He kept working and inserted a new piece of machinery into the arm, started to wire it up. "Anyway. I started to resent Captain America, just another piece of my childhood that my dad ruined for me. And I resented him for a long time. You know, one of our very first conversations almost ended in pistols at dawn. Figuratively speaking."

While Tony probably wouldn't believe it, that image was not actually that far out there for James.

"We still don't quite see eye to eye and probably never will. But. I'm my own man, I've always done what I want, but Steve has lost all his supportive structures twice in four years, or what amounts to four years for him and… He's not doing well. I don't want to call him suicidal, not with you out there now to look for and Wilson having an eye on him, but you know what was the first time I saw him smile in real life? When I fell out of a wormhole and wasn't dead." Over this whole speech, he'd not looked up once, hands steady and working inside of James' arm. 

James couldn't move, he was stuck there, but there was nothing to say for him either. With anyone else he could have argued about the guy he'd killed a few weeks ago, the one who had pierced his kidney, but Tony had been a weapons manufacturer and had his own death toll and he knew the stakes. He knew that James and Steve had killed a lot of people together in the past.

Eventually Tony closed the arm up and asked him to move the wrist. It seemed to accept the adamantium replacements just fine. It didn't feel any different, either, which was good news. Keeping to the rules, but sneaking around them just the same, he put a hand on James' metal shoulder. "Look, I know you have some things to work through and you're not feeling up to a full social calendar. I just thought maybe you could do that together."

He dropped his hand quickly before James could say anything. James gave him a lopsided smile and said, "Are you matchmaking?" before he got up and went to the door.

"I didn't think I'd need to," he heard just before he left the workshop.

***

New York City had over eight million inhabitants. That didn't count the daily commuters or any of the million tourists in the city every day. In the western world, it probably was _the_ most populous city.

Those facts alone, without even taking the significance for business into account, was making New York City a target for all kinds of attacks; not just the Chitauri army had shown that two years ago. 

None of those facts though had prepared Bucky for sitting in his favorite diner over coffee and pancakes and seeing on the news in the idiot box that something was happening. He'd been a man at war — three wars, really — he really didn't care about having the front coming home too much. 

To top that all off, ghouls had apparently invaded New York and were feasting on people. 

"More like Morlocks," James muttered into his coffee even as the waitress who'd just topped off his cup was quivering and holding on to the counter.

"What?" she asked. 

"Morlocks? It's from a story. Ghouls feed from the dead, Morlocks feed on the living." Didn't people these days read books anymore? Everyone frequenting a library had known that when he was young. 

The waitress just squealed and shivered. That was the moment the TV announcer said, "The Avengers have been requested, approval pending."

Was that how it worked, did Tony take formal requests on this sort of stuff? 

"Oh thank God," the waitress breathed, making James roll his eyes. 

"God had very little to do with it, unless they manage to get Thor down here," he answered and threw a twenty on the table before leaving. If they were anything like Morlocks, they would live underground, but James couldn't be sure that a story held all the truth. It was still early, but Dorothy had been in the Army and would be an early riser. He left a note on her mailbox to not leave her place while until it had blown over. Charles had gone somewhere with his mother a few days ago, along with luggage, so he wasn't too worried about keeping him out of harm's way.

The biggest free area in New York was Central Park, so after a stop at his hotel, James took himself over the bridge against the stream of people fleeing Manhattan — probably a prudent move after the last time the Avengers had fought there. Time Square was virtually empty, save for a few hardened stragglers who tried to make a profit or just couldn't stop working. The large neon displays indeed showed the Avengers assembled, or at least some of them. He could spot Steve, Tony, the Hulk and the Black Widow. James wasn't sure whether that inspired confidence. 

The library was still open, he was rather sure that nothing could shut operation of this institution down. If there was such a thing, he didn't want to know about it.

Ghouls, the books said, could be killed by decapitation or sometimes by fire. Very well, then he could shelve his considerations of where to obtain silver bullets. Then again, this was New York in modern times, apparently there was nothing here that was unobtainable for the right price. 

A rifle, copious amounts of ammo and a white tarp were downright easy to get. Central Park as a location presented the disadvantage of trees and not being able to see through the foliage, but James would trade that for a contained area. He settled on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which at least put him above the tree line and pulled the tarp over himself. The fighting wasn't concentrated in a single spot, which made it not as easy to spot as James might have wanted to. 

He sighted through the scope, trying to spot familiar faces; Stark was flying on top, shooting energy bolts and James wasn't too worried about him, also since he was in the suit. 

The ghouls were smaller than humans by a considerable bit. Their bodies were lithe, but muscles and their skins pale like bleached cotton so James was probably right about their underground dwellings. That explain Central Park, they could come out of the ground from there and just drag people down to feed. Their faces were round with disproportionately large eyes and the sharp teeth of predators in their slightly elongated snouts. All in all, as an average citizen, James wouldn't want to meet one of them during the light of day, let alone in the dark when they must be truly fear inspiring spectres.

The Widow was in the thick of it, busy slicing with a machete, but she was losing ground, even though chopped off heads were littered around her. James didn't remember whether Morlocks had been fighting at all, and if they had whether it was in an organized group, but these fuckers were. Sighting, he spotted one about to just about to jump, calculated bullet speed and hit it just as it was about to land on her back. She must have felt something for she turned around, swung and took its head off. Then she looked around in confusion but was too busy with the next round.

US sniper training during the war had been a joke. In basic they had stuck rifles into everyone's hands, taught them to shoot and then moved the targets steadily further back. Those who hit the targets furthest away were designated snipers and that had been that. Against the Germans, they had been hopelessly outmatched. After Steve had gotten him out of Austria, he had been better than ever before, hands steadier and more controlled. But the Soviets had been the ones to really train him. 

The Hulk joined the Widow, tearing ghouls apart and James left off; he wasn't too worried about their teeth getting through the green guy's hide. Letting the crosshairs wander around the park, he saw Steve. "Gotcha," he breathed. 

Bullets didn't stop ghouls, but they slowed them down and James put several bullets into heads in quick succession. It wasn't clean sniping, he had to reload continuously, he didn't have time to match his breathing to his trigger finger, but it didn't matter, it worked. Good thing James wasn't a purist.

It took all morning, but eventually the crisis seemed averted. James was almost out of ammo, collected the shells and shouldered his rifle to make his way back into Brooklyn. He wanted a shower and a beer and not see what the news said. 

With a strangled scream he woke from an afternoon nap. Ghouls had been tearing into Steve, tearing the uniform off his body and gouging flesh, burying their bloody muzzles in his open chest and stomach. Steve's eyes had been staring at Bucky, sightless and filmed over.

After Austria, his assignment had improved infinitely. As the one standing right behind Steve unquestioned, he was only in the trenches when absolutely required, moved from being cannon fodder and cold all the time to an elite force. With Steve as his CO. Finally Steve had the fight he'd always wanted, could do the things he felt were necessary. James wasn't sure whether he just didn't care, or had failed to see the price he would pay, that his life didn't belong to him anymore, but there was no way for him to say anything. 

Steve was… He was lost to James and he kept losing Steve over and over. First the draft letter had set them on different paths, the orders for Europe had torn them apart and when James had first sat in a cage and then been strapped to a laboratory table that had been that. Name, rank, serial number, that was what they were supposed to give and nothing else. Those three pieces of information were all James had given them from the start, which had done nothing for him, because rogue science divisions cared nothing for Geneva Conventions and did whatever they wanted with their prisoners. James had known his life was at an end, and he'd gotten it back only to lose it again two years later.

He was still here now though.

***

Charles was eleven now but that didn't mean he was supposed to sit alone outside on the steps of his building, looking sad. Suddenly though, he raised his head and looked at him directly. Frowning, James dropped off the roof and pushed back his hood.

"How do you even know I'm there?" he asked and sat down next to him. 

He looked up at him, narrowing his eyes, then sniffed. "I can see your shadow, sometimes. I like it, I know I'm safe."

"Then why are you sad?" he asked, trying to cover his sheer delight at the boy saying that, and wasn't that an emotion he hadn't had in a while. When he only nodded at the sheet of paper on the door he twisted to be able to read it. An eviction notice. "Really?"

"Yeah, the landlord doesn't want us here anymore, the whole house. Mom and everyone else went to talk to the city. I don't want to leave." With surprising strength and speed, he threw himself at him and hugged him around his torso. For a second, James froze, trying to remember when had been the last time someone had touched a non-metal part of him without the intention to hurt. It had been a while. It might have been Steve. He swallowed hard, then carefully lifted one arm and put it on the boy's shoulder, making gentle stroking motion, tried to push him away from the knife he was dangerously close to.

"It's okay. Don't cry." But that only made him cry harder. "I get it. I also grew up here and had to leave."

A muffled, "Really"?" sounded from his chest and he nodded, moved his hand to the boy's head and stroked his hair. 

"Yes, a long time ago," he said let the twang into his voice. "Not right here, but also in Brooklyn. Shhh."

After fifteen minutes, he sniffed and raised his head again, having stopped shaking with tears a little while ago. "I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't cry but—."

"It's all right. Since when do you know?" 

"Before school let out for the summer. That's why mom and I went to Aunt Phyllis in Maine, to see if maybe we have to move there." He kicked his feet against the stoop. "Why did you come today? I don't have school for another two weeks, you don't need to bring me home."

Smiling, he stroked his hair one more time, feeling how soft it was even through the glove and then took his hands away. "I wanted to check in before I left the city for a few days. Just to make sure everything was okay."

"Everything is okay," Charles told him and looked at his watch. "My mom is about to be back, you should go back to the roof."

Laughing, he got up. "You're way too clever, I need to be more careful with you."

Charlese watched him scale the gutter pipe and he waited until his mother and several elderly people came back, looking anything but happy. 

Never would he have thought it would be so hard to find a public phone in the City of New York, when Bucky had lived here last time there was one at every corner. Eventually he managed to find one, put in his money and waited impatiently.

"Tony, I have a building owner in Brooklyn that wants all of his tenants out by the end of the month. Can you do something?" James didn't really have time to waste, he wanted to be on his way. 

"What? I'm working. Wait. What did you say?" He repeated word for word. "And why are you calling me from a payphone? Nice work at Central Park by the way, thanks for not messing up the servos this time."

Of course Tony would have noticed that he'd been there. "Because I didn't want to come by. Can you do something?" 

Tony seemed to consider for a moment. "Give me the address. You don't have a phone?"

"Why would I need a phone?" he asked and dictated street and number, hoping it was really this easy.

"But you looked at the SHIELD files?"

James was losing his nerve. "Tony, the library has internet access. Can you help or not?"

"I'll get my people on it. Can you pass by here and bring my darling? I had some ideas for the suit I need to test with your arm first." Leave it to Tony to be excited. "You shouldn't be using that miracle of technology with what the library has available, it's nothing short of blasphemy."

James pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. "I wanted to get out of town for a few days, actually."

"Did something happen?"

"No." He didn't think he had to give Tony any specifics. He exhaled. "See you later, Tony."

Contrary to his own intentions he did pass by the Tower that evening. The weather had turned in a spectacular fashion and James didn't want to stand around in the rain. Even now water was dripping from his hair down his back. When he came to the workroom though, it was dark.

"JARVIS, you should have told me that Tony's asleep," James said with a frown. Usually the AI was more accommodating to its master.

"He's on the phone, Sergeant, yelling at Captain Rogers' mailbox. I'll inform him you're here once he hangs up." What had Steve done now?

He asked Dummy when he rolled up. "I think Tony is mad with him." Dummy made an affirmative sound and James reached out to pet it.

"It's good you and my robots get on so well," Tony said from behind him, sliding the door open. Over the past months he had known Tony as an earnest, exasperated person, but he usually was in a, if not jovial, then at least mild mannered mood. Not so tonight. Tonight his mood could have cut someone's throat, probably. "At least one person here appreciates the fruits of my labor."

"What did he do?" James asked, leaning against one of the few free spaces of wall available, arms crossed over his chest. 

Tony threw up his hands. "What didn't he do, Barnes? First, he picks the biggest bone he could find with Thor, then he takes off without a word and for all the intel I have right now, he's invading a HYDRA base without backup. And now I have a moping, angry God of Thunder upstairs, you might have noticed the weather shifting, and an absent super soldier and I know why I never wanted Fury's job!"

As if to punctuate his words, the sky split apart in searing brightness and thunder almost made them deaf. 

James blinked against the spots in his vision. "Wow. What did he do to Thor?"

"Thor," Tony said, gesturing to bring up holograms, showing footage some of which James had seen before, "his brother died recently, you might have read about the trouble in London, but he was helping Thor defeat the dark elves. Did you know there are dark elves out there? Anyway, Steve had the gall to tell him that sacrifice was the least he could have done. The least! And Thor has been protective of his little brother when he was the bad guy, you can imagine what's going on now."

"Steve has always been a reckless jerk," James allowed and shrugged; no point in sugarcoating it, James had always been very straight with Steve about what he thought about his stunts. He was more concerned about Steve going AWOL; he'd only ever done that once and it had ended in explosions. 

Tony rounded on him. "Reckless? You call that _a little reckless_? This isn't bullying the SSR into having his way, this is the God of Thunder being mad at Captain Stick-up-his-Ass, and you call that— Fuck you, Barnes, you've been mind controlled for too long if you don't see that this is a powder keg!"

James could feel his vision going red at the edges, but though his fingers reached for his knife he didn't grab it, only got into Tony's face. Probably a match to first blood with Iron Man was not necessarily recommended. "Do you think you're telling me anything new? I've known that guy my whole life, he's no goody two shoes! Steve has always played by his own rules, even when he didn't have that body yet and it wasn't always the good fight. He got into so many unnecessary scraps, even when people asked him not to interfere and stay out of it he made it his business! 

"History has done so much to whitewash both of our lives, but how often do you think he was the only one who thought what he was doing was the right thing? And yes, I always stood with him and finished the fights he couldn't, but that doesn't mean I agreed with what he did! But no matter how wrong I thought he was, I love the guy, I didn't want him to _die_!" And then Steve had gone ahead and died anyway, because James got himself killed and Peggy couldn't stop Steve from being an imbecile who thought he could do it all himself.

Thunder crashed as if to add emphasize to James' words, and in some parts of Manhattan they could see through the windows the lights went out; the Tower remained a beacon in the night. Mouth falling open and closed, Tony was visibly gathering himself and James had to look away, hand quivering. He was out of breath and didn't want to rehash what he'd just said.

"How long have you been working towards that one?" Tony eventually asked, voice infused with a levity neither of them felt.

Emotions coursed through James, relief and resignation and something akin to bitterness, he pressed his lips together. "Shut up, Tony."

Surprisingly, Tony did give it a rest and just directed James to sit on the stool he usually occupied, pressed a tumbler of whiskey into his hand and ordered him to enjoy it. With a flourish, he then pulled out a tray that contained circuit boards in a filigree that put even what James had seen on the schematics of his arm to shame. 

"Before I went tabula rasa on my gallery, I had an interface that would interpret my brain waves and translate them to my suit, I didn't even need to be inside. This is the other direction, this would tap into minute electric currents off the skin and makes the suit react faster to what I want it to do." It was a somewhat roundabout explanation, but James wasn't all that interested in the hard science anyway, so he nodded. "The double purpose is that we can replace the nerve-to-metal interface in your shoulder and make your arm lighter and even faster."

James frowned. "Wouldn't that take away some of its firepower?"

"If you want firepower I have an interesting proposal about repulsors and laser— No? Too bad, but the answer is no, the arm's strength has very little to do with its weight." Tony put one of the boards into James' hand to pointed out with a miniature screwdriver where the nerve connections would go. "But this requires a bit more wetwork than I'm comfortable with and Bruce is an expert in this sort of stuff. At least before he went all green and angry he was an expert in this kind of thing."

"Tony—"

He held up a hand. "I know you don't want anyone else involved in this, and I want to test them in the suits first before I put them _inside_ of a person, but I want you to know the option is open."

Blinking, James shook his head, sipped the last of the whiskey. The liquid left a pleasant burn down his throat and warmed his stomach. "I told you I'm leaving town for a few days."

"Take that time and think about it, let me know after. I really do think it would be worthwhile. I also want you to take these." With that he shoved a phone and tablet computer at James, who frowned. "Just in case you need them. Untrackable and they'll wipe themselves if anyone but you tries to use them."

James ignored him and looked out the window into the still dark night, where lightning chased across the sky and thunder rumbled in the distance. Manhattan was still blacked out in a way that James had very rarely seen even in the Thirties, or Twenties for that matter. "Tell Thor that Steve is a hotheaded bastard with very little brain capacity. He jumped on a grenade once, when he didn't look like he does today yet, that should illustrate the point pretty well."

"Dad mentioned that once, trying to tell me something about honor and courage. To be honest I thought it was pretty fucking stupid." Tony remained seated when James got up, barking a laugh mid-movement.

"Damn right, it was pretty fucking stupid and then some." He turned to go.

Tony called after him, still seated at his bench, "You're not going after him, are you?"

"No," James answered, shaking his head. "If he really wants to invade a HYDRA base alone — again — then let him. They won't kill him, and if he doesn't come back, you can still go and rescue him. Steve needs to understand that one day it's going to get him killed."

"It already did, once," the other man said quietly and James turned around at that, looking him in the eye.

"Yes, Tony. It got me killed once, too. I followed him willingly that time, knowing the stakes. If you don't want to risk losing any of your people though, let him have his way this time and tell him in no uncertain terms that it isn't about him anymore but about the ones he's leaving behind." When they'd been young, when they'd been at war most of the time they'd only had each other. The playing field was different now; Steve didn't live in the Tower because he had to, but because these were the people he'd chosen to surround himself with and give his trust to. James depended on himself first and foremost because that was what he knew, and because he couldn't stand the thought of someone he knew and loved in the crosshairs when he pulled the trigger between one heartbeat and the next. 

He couldn't wait for Tony to get it and come to the conclusion he had to. These days he didn't need JARVIS anymore to give him directions and the AI remained blissfully silent, it probably knew when to pick its battles.

***

This time when he stood in front of the display about James Buchanan Barnes, 1917 - 1945, he recognized the picture as a still from a news reel they'd showed to them once between missions. Those were some of the necessary trappings of working with Captain America — public exposure — and he'd teased Steve endlessly about it. Whatever Steve had done in the years before, he'd never needed public recognition and now he got more of it than he'd ever dreamed of. The unfortunate consequences of having been made the first and only super soldier on the planet.

When he'd been here the first time, months ago, James hadn't had his name back yet. All he knew when he saw the display was that the man he'd faced on the carrier hadn't lied to him. Back in March, he had had no idea who James Barnes was supposed to be, aside from the bare facts on the wall that had made it through seventy years of historical censorship and political correctness. 

James Buchanan Barnes was a ghost as much as the Winter Soldier had been, and he'd wondered, coming out of the Smithsonian, how much of him they had killed and replaced in their laboratories to make of him what he had become. It turned out … not all that much, and if that wasn't the most telling conclusion to the last few months, he had some re-evaluating to do. He'd lived so long with codenames and descriptions of himself that it had been nigh impossible to associate a name with the face staring back at him in the mirror. But now James finally felt he was filling out the frame he had been given. 

Bucky Barnes had been a boy who went to war and survived by the skin of his teeth; Sergeant James B. Barnes, 32557038, had been a prisoner of war and then a Howling Commando under the command of Captain Steven G. Rogers, Captain America, and gone MIA during a mission infiltrating HYDRA; the Winter Soldier had been an assassin for the Soviet Red Room and later for the very organization he'd been trying to take out as a member of the US Army. James Buchanan Barnes was a man with a highly specific skill set honed in wars both hot and cold, who right now lived a quiet and ordinary life — if regular servicing of a cybernetic arm by a billionaire in a tin can could be called ordinary — but that was not what assassins were trained for.

The few seconds' movie reel of Steve and him laughing were a testament to simpler times and to the part of their relationship they'd been negotiating for years without finding a final solution until it had found them. Steve had not let him out of his sight after James had been debriefed by the SSR — what had he seen, who had asked him, what had he been asked, what had they done to him, what had he been asked, what had he told them, what had he been asked, what had be told them — had stared at him until James felt self-conscious and had brushed him off.

"When the war is over," Steve used to say at night in their shared tent or barracks room or hayloft with enough space for everyone to have some semblance of privacy, "when the war is over, we'll figure it out."

He'd forgotten, James thought bitterly, that Steve had signed over his identity. For James there might have been a discharge after the war, free for him to spend the rest of his life to tell heroics to his children and grandchildren sitting on his knees, but too much money and resources had been spent on Steve to let him go.

At another display, James wondered whether Steve had ever been here and looked at all of this, the stories that were true but omitted all the people they'd killed together, that had preserved their clothes and the only few remembrances that they had of each other for a curious and adoring public. Captain America was the hero in this story and Sergeant Barnes stood to protect his most vulnerable spot, but all in all it was barely about them; the two fellows who had grown up eating from each other's plates and fighting each other's fights, but who also lived on stolen, frantic moments without ever uttering a word about it in broad daylight.

Apparently they had lowered the flags on Brooklyn Bridge the day Steve had crashed that plane in the Arctic, only to raise it again in triumph when Nazi Germany surrendered. That was the last image from the 40s, before the exhibit switched to Captain America's glorious return in the Battle of New York.

James blinked. He'd been wondering since Central Park how to do it and how to find a way that made Steve come to him, where James still had a way out if he needed it in the last second. This might just be it. 

He wondered how much hydrogen peroxide he'd need to bleach giant linen sheets.

***

While he waited he got a text from Tony — like there was anyone else who would send him text messages.

 _Bought the building, will upgrade it but tenants can stay._ , with a little Iron Man emoticon making a peace sign. James rolled his eyes in mock exasperation but was glad that Charles would be able to stay in his home. 

Past three o'clock last night James had set his plan into motion. Brooklyn Bridge had gone dark, the huge lights illuminating the towers had been easily covered with aluminum pans and James had easily scaled the steel cables to get up; Roebling had made that almost too easy in the design. From a backpack he retrieved the tightly folded linen sheets and replaced the flag first on the Brooklyn side and then on the tower in the middle of the river. James had been in the Army, he knew how to fold a flag properly for later re-use. 

The new flags now fluttering from the poles were pure white, although bleaching had left behind the stars-and-stripes pattern just as James had intended. This was sure to get someone's attention, and who better to restore a landmark to its proper glory than the Star Spangled Man with a Plan? At least James hoped that was the reasoning everyone would arrive at, or that Steve would be so offended he'd take it upon himself.

He had no idea what to say to Steve when — if — he showed up. Steve had been his touchstone for as long as James could think, the single person outside his family who he would rely on without hesitation. He knew Steve had felt the same about him, even though often enough he'd tried to not actually do it; money in the Rogers household had been considerably shorter than for the Barnes family. As they grew up though, Steve had become exponentially more reckless, and James had been dragged along. He didn't mind; Steve was his friend and friends stood in for one another.

They'd orbited around one another for so long that James found it hard to remember when he'd first thought he maybe felt the same for Steve as he felt as for the girls who were flirtatious and playful, although seldom easy. Or not the same, but something in the same direction, because he knew none of those girls but he knew Steve, inside and out. It helped that Steve wasn't any braver than him and when they did talk about it one night the time hadn't been right. Steve's mom was already sick and in a downward spiral and Steve himself had been running a fever that felt off the charts to James' ice cold hands. 

Sick people were allowed to say things that healthy people wouldn't get away with, but James had spun the tables on that and was telling Steve secrets he hoped his friend wouldn't remember when the fever broke. Sentences that included, 'I need you' and 'you can't leave me' and 'please, please, please, you have to stay with me' were hard to misinterpret. Steve had squeezed his fingers and told him he couldn't make that kind of promise and that was why they couldn't. 

Steve must have remembered something though, because he did try to ask James about it later, after he was healthy, but James hadn't allowed it.

Truth was, this right now was the first time the playing field had ever been level. 

When they had been kids, Steve had been infinitely more likely to die from every asthma attack, every flu raging through the city, or taking someone on in a fight who would finally stick something sharp into him. There had been a few stolen kisses in the attic of their high school when they had been much younger and a bunch of older guys had locked them up there. It had been ice cold up there in January, and James had wanted and seen no reason why not.

When James had gone off to war, well, the odds were suddenly reversed. That last night at home, when Steve had apparently managed to get himself successfully drafted — the idiot — James had wanted them to have a good time and maybe take one last good memory with him. They were living together, sharing a room and often enough sharing a bed when it got too cold or lonely when they were on their own, but it wasn't meant to be.

Steve showing up like a menacing angel out of nowhere in that base in Austria — James thought now maybe it should have been a miracle or a sign. Those were known to happen, weren't they? James had been cold and hungry and exhausted, but if he wanted to stand with Steve, he needed to force himself forward. He'd caught up on sleep and clothes and food eventually, double rations for a few days and Steve next to him every night from then on, pulling him in. Surprisingly, no one had said anything. Today, James thought there had probably been a few wagers about when they would finally get their heads out of their asses; he wondered who was the one with the longest stakes. Jones, probably, he was the smartest among all of them and seemed to have a read on them. 

They should have— They should have so many things. They should have had more than a few kisses when the nights were endless and hands down each other's pants when the missions had been too arduous and terrible and the only comfort they could take was in each other. But James was still more likely to die — and wasn't that a nice self-fulfilling prophecy in the end — and here they were. Finally the field had leveled. James was equally likely to take a knife to the throat as Steve was to take a bullet through the head. It had only taken seventy years and a few dozen traumatizing thaw-kill-wipe-freeze-rinse-repeat cycles, but here they were.

Luck was with him and it was a nice, sunny day that cast the proper illumination on the flags early in the morning. James wasn't nervous; at least he told that to himself. There was no reason to be. He knew Steve. If there was anyone in the world he shouldn't be worried about seeing right now, it was Steve. He felt exposed in his dark red t-shirt and without the gloves on, but he was making a statement here. 

It was officially too late to run when he spotted a uniform he knew from long treks through the European countryside arrive on top of the tower platform via steel cable. When Steve came towards him, James levered himself up and crossed his arms over chest, metal arm on top and he knew it was reflecting the sunlight, making it very clear who he was.

Steve pushed back his cowl. When he said, "Bucky?" in a hoarse voice tinged in utter disbelief, it still sounded right.

"Yeah pal," James answered, "now that the war is over, I thought it was time we figured it out."

 

.Fin (for now)

**Author's Note:**

> I first had the idea after [this story](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28427078) broke internationally, after which I sat on my hands for a few more weeks while it gestated and then wrote it out in a few days. 
> 
> I took two lines from a snippet from a tumblr post by [savingprivatehale](http://savingprivatehale.tumblr.com/), though I changed context and situation, but I liked it for the setting. 
> 
> Morlocks are from the H.G. Wells story "The Time Machine", not from the Marvel characters.
> 
> Lastly, yes there will likely be a sequel, the arrival of which is not quite on the horizon though there is a plot. UPDATE: Yes, the sequel is still in the works, yes, I know it's been a while. But it's 2/3 written and my life got complicated.


End file.
